


you're the fire and the flood

by notbang



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hand Sex, Sharing a Bed, acknowledgement of a post-s3 finale world, apocalypse!, buckle in boys we're doing a bottle episode, but only in the context of literally burning it with fire, just like the movie I am legend but not like that at all, santa ana winds induced reluctant co-habitation, they're both pissed off and yet turned on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 08:15:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14930564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbang/pseuds/notbang
Summary: It figures that right when Rebecca’s about to get her life together, right when she’s about to start over and fresh, the world decides to fall apart.“The world isn’t ending,” he scoffs with false bravado, in an attempt to lighten the mood. “California has forest fires every year. So this one’s a little out of control—so what? They’ll put it out eventually. They always do.”When a forest is burned, what comes back may not resemble what was lost.Rebecca Bunch has never been particularly afraid of fire.





	you're the fire and the flood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cori_the_bloody](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cori_the_bloody/gifts).



> Written for the prompt _things you said at the end of the world._
> 
> So this originally started out as a joke, then turned into a crackfic for a prompt meme, then suddenly wasn't a crackfic at all and 23k later here we are. Oops. Shoutout to Holl for being the official cheerleader of the apocalypse.

“Book or movie?”

She flinches at the sound of voices behind her, dropping her pack to the dirt with a heavy thud and twisting to keep them where she can see them. The source turns out to be a girl—a pair of girls, to be precise, but the one posing the question speaking on both their behalves, apparently—in a pink cap and plaid shirt, two perfect pigtails jutting out from under her brim.

“Hmm?”

“I’m Ashley—with an E-Y—and this is my sister, Hannah. You’re doing _Wild,_ right? Are you here because you read the book, or watched the movie?”

Rebecca doesn’t return the smile or bother reciprocating the introduction, busying herself instead with tightening the top drawstring on her pack, her eyes never quite settling.

“Oh, right—that’s a whole thing. Neither,” she says absently. “TV show.” Off their blank looks she clarifies, “I saw it on an episode of _Gilmore Girls_?”

Hannah stifles a giggle but Ashley-with-an-E-Y looks less than impressed; if the other girl wasn’t already prepared to argue her point on precisely which kind of fan was the correct kind (book, obviously, judging by the weathered paperback stuffed in her side pocket), Rebecca can see the protest bubbling up in her like bicarbonate at the suggestion of a third, far more outlandish option.

“I mean, I probably would’ve read the book or watched the movie if I could have, since I recently found myself with a lot of time on my hands, but they don’t have books or movies in prison, so. Here I am. Winging it.”

She tilts her head and fixes Ashley-with-an-E-Y with a steely stare, the smile that twitches at her lips entirely sardonic, until the girls hastily link arms, wide-eyed, and scamper away.

Satisfied by their retreat she sits down and sinks her teeth into her apple, flexing her blistered toes deep inside her brand new boots with a sigh.

* * *

Rebecca Bunch has never been particularly afraid of fire.

She’s always been kind of fascinated by it, even; felt something kin reflected back at her in the untamed flickering of its flames and on some level fantasised about harnessing its power. Which, if she’s honest, is ultimately how she ended up watching every meticulous life plan hinged on Harvard Law School literally go up in smoke before her eyes, slapped with an arson charge her senior year of college and left with little but the bitter taste of charcoal Robert had left in her mouth. It hadn't stopped the itch in her fingertips when she wanted the remnants of Josh and Greg erased from her mind, though; hadn't stopped her from striking a match to every memory of them she could assemble, soaked in vodka in her sink.

(Burning her ex-lover’s house down was revenge, hot and heady. Burning her own house down was regrettable.)

She’s halfway up the mountain range when she spots it—the spire of smoke rising up out of the canopy down below when she pauses on the outcrop. It’s not fear that it piques, but curiosity; intrigue at the hypnotic way the white-grey cloud winds out and up around the tree trunks, thick and heavy and slow-moving, like some kind of mystical all-consuming fog.

There’s a faint glow somewhere at the centre of it and she stops, twists and turns to squint at the source of it and then she’s slipping, sliding, and suddenly everything else goes black.

* * *

The first thing she notices when she starts to come to is that the soundscape is different; all the crackling of foliage and quiet hum of insects and the wind whirling through the rocks overhead has disappeared, replaced with distant murmurs and the whirring and beeping of machines. Her throat feels so dry it hurts to swallow and it takes her several attempts to open her eyes, the lids feeling heavy and paper-thin all at once, burnt and brittle like sun-scorched leaves, threatening to decay into dust at the slightest movement. She pries them open eventually, though—peels them apart and blinks at the onslaught of fluorescent light that immediately overwhelms her. Her hand feels sweaty and warm at her side and it takes her a moment to realise it’s because it’s encased in someone else’s. Licking her lips, she attempts to formulate words. 

“Hey,” she chokes out, a hoarse whisper that rattles in the back of her throat. 

The noise is ineffectual, and she tries again, succeeding in a slightly greater volume the second time around, accompanying it with a weak squeeze—apparently the combination works because the rumpled pile of blue cotton next to her shifts and straightens, and her stomach drops as she stares.

“Nath—Nathaniel?” she manages, her surprise stifled somewhat by her raw vocal chords.

He swallows and drops her hand like he’s been burned. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Thirsty.”

He nods, scrubbing at his eyes, and rises from his chair to move around the opposite side of her cot where there’s a water jug on the bed stand; he pours her a glass and slides the tray table over, setting it down in front of her. Making an attempt to sit up, she drains it greedily, coughing and wincing when she drinks too fast, almost inhaling it in her haste.

“Easy,” he warns.

“My head hurts.”

“A concussion will do that to you, I hear.”

She hisses as she shifts in the bed, trying to sit up straighter still, eventually settling on a position that is only slightly uncomfortable. Her lips sting when she tries to talk and she brings her fingers up to find them heavily chapped, scaly and raw. When she coughs it seizes in her lungs and sends a sharp pain licking up her side. 

“What happened?” she wheezes. “And what the hell are you doing here?”

For a long moment he only stares at her.

He looks a little older, she supposes, but mostly the same—she can’t tell for sure if the weariness in his face is a mark of passing years or merely the unclear number of uncomfortable hours he’s spent awkwardly hunched in a hospital chair. The hair is different to how she remembers—clipped shorter at the sides, the crest considerably more contained—and the carefully cultivated layer of stubble takes her back to the first time she met him and the prickle of it at her skin in the low light of an elevator.

“An inexperienced hiker was found passed out on the edge of the Mojave Desert in the middle of a forest fire with no identification except a ballpoint pen with my name on it.”

“They called you because of a pen?”

“They called my dad, actually,” he corrects. “There’s three of us in LA County with that name.”

He looks at her like he’s waiting for her to say something, but she’s got nothing, so he barrels on eventually, emboldened.

“He almost didn’t pass it on. But then he couldn’t resist bringing it up, just to berate me. Remember that time you threw your life away for a _felon_ , Nathaniel, hmm? Looks like your little girlfriend’s at it again. Wonder what kind of circus act she’s trying to drag you into this time.”

She knows he’s technically only mimicking his father but something about his tone makes her feel stupid and small, like a belittled child, and she turns away to fight back the hot, wet pricking at her eyes and the back of her throat. She can still feel his eyes on her, though, boring into her, dark and accusing.

He draws his lips into his mouth to wet them before speaking again, tone bitter. “You were released six weeks ago and you didn’t tell me? You didn’t think that was something I deserved to know?”

Suddenly every errant thread in the hospital bedspread is inexplicably interesting, holding her attention in a way the hard lines in his disappointed face can’t seem to.

“We haven’t spoken in over two years,” she protests in a small voice.

“ _Because you took me off your visitor’s list,_ ” he says, slamming his hand down on his thigh and making her flinch. “What the _hell_ , Rebecca?”

She scrunches her eyes shut, tight as she can.

“You should go,” she exhales. “I appreciate you coming and making sure they had something other than ‘Jane Doe’ to put on my charts, really, but I’m fine. You can go back to your life now. Without me in it.”

Nathaniel’s lips draw into a thin, tight line as he works his jaw, clearly agitated. He paces the length of the room three times, nostrils flared, hands stuffed unceremoniously in his pockets before stopping abruptly, and for a brief second it seems like he’s about to say something.

But then he nods once, tightly, and just like that, he’s gone.

* * *

They keep her under observation for three more days.

She managed to narrowly escape both brain damage from her fall and carbon monoxide poisoning from her proximity to the fire, it turns out, but she still hit her head and inhaled a heck of a lot of smoke. They have her on oxygen for hours at a time and the mask she has to wear makes her feel like she’s suffocating.

In lieu of cards and flowers she receives a stern talking-to from her parole officer and strict instructions for her imminent discharge; she gets a pass for the concussion, but it doesn’t extend to her unplanned pilgrimage into the mountains. 

“Hey, um. Who would I talk to about maybe getting some kind of an IOU on this little spur of the minute staycation? Because, uh, I’ve kind of been out of action, for a few years, if you know what I’m saying, and I sort of spent all of the paycheck they gave me on hiking boots and a rucksack, and hiking stuff is just, like, _ridiculously_ expensive for some reason, even on sale, so I don’t really have—”

The nurse barely spares her a glance. “Your medical expenses have been taken care of, Miss Bunch.”

Rebecca blinks. “Sorry? Uh, hello—could you… could you maybe look at me, for a second? Hi. Hello. Taken care of? What does that mean—‘taken care of’?”

The other woman looks up, finally, fixing her with an impatient stare. “All of your bills were paid in full two days ago. I guess you got your hands on a different kind of IOU, huh?”

Frowning in consternation, she asks if there’s a payphone she can use and fumbles with the touch screen for a moment, dismayed to find it only takes card until someone takes pity on her and offers her their iPhone.

“Thanks. I don’t—I don’t know the number, do you mind if I Google it?”

It takes her a few attempts but she finds the one she’s looking for, rubbing her hand nervously up and down her arm as she waits through the dial tone, the call connecting and sending her stomach constricting in on itself with a jolt.

“Hey, it’s uh… it’s Rebecca. I know I’m an asshole for even asking this after everything but… do you think you could maybe come pick me up?”

* * *

“Wow. Whaaat happened to you—your face kind of looks like you fell asleep on a fire grill.”

“Cool, so I see you’ve kept your sunny personality,” Rebecca gripes as she slides into the back seat of Heather’s car.

“Hey Rebecca,” Hector offers, turning around to grin at her.

Heather’s got her hair straightened out and hanging in loose long waves around her face, her eyebrow hoop traded in for a delicate diamond nose stud. She looks neater, Rebecca muses; more composed but still edgy, like she could be the director of some hip upscale art gallery. Hector, on the other hand, looks mostly exactly the same, and there’s something overwhelmingly comforting in that.

“Like, for real, though—what were you doing in the hospital?” Heather asks as she reverses out of the parking lot. “Did you get in some kind of riot? Because there were definite bets that you’d get in a riot.”

Rebecca huffs and crosses her arms. “No, I did not get in a riot. I was trying to do _Wild_ , okay?”

“Oh. People are still doing that? Book or movie?”

“Neither. TV show. I got the idea from an episode of—you know what, it’s not important.”

Hector’s face lights up. “Hey, speaking of television—you’ve probably got a whole bunch of shows to catch up on, right? There’s been like, three seasons of _Orange is the New Black_ since you were gone.”

“Which she missed because she was _living them_ ,” Heather says with a groan, widening her eyes at him menacingly. “You moron.”

Relatively unfazed, Hector is only somewhat sheepish as he twists in his seat and passes her a brown paper bag.

“We got you a donut. Heather said this kind was always your favourite. Too bad Sugar Face got shut down for health code violations—we had to drive to the other side of town to get it.”

She takes the bag wordlessly, and feels an odd sort of pang when she crinkles it open and peers down into it. She can’t remember for sure the last time she had one, but her brain does a good job of conjuring up several possibilities, all of them far-away and foreign—her, surrounded by her girls, heart full and overflowing with contentment.

The icing is sickly against her tongue.

“I had to get a number for you off the Home Base website,” she says after a pained gulp, forgetting her airways are still a little raw. “So I guess you’re still rocking their corporate world, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I have a mortgage and a 401k, now. It’s all kind of terrifying. I have to organise vacation time _in advance_. I don’t even know who I am anymore. But we’re still stumbling our way through it,” Heather adds with an affectionate squeeze of Hector’s palm.

“Oh,” Rebecca says a little forlornly, noticing for the first time the matching rings on their left hands. “Did you… did you two get married while I was gone?”

“Oh, no,” Heather dismisses. “We’re like, way too young and hip to be a lame married couple yet, so right now we’re just kind of, engaged to be engaged? Yeah. It’s cool.”

“All the commitment, without any of the drama,” Hector adds, giving her finger guns from the front seat. “I mean, you would know better than anyone, right, Rebecca? Weddings are _way_ more hassle than they’re worth.”

“ _Dude._ ”

Rebecca turns her head back to the window, catching Heather leaning across the console to slap him from the corner of her eye. She doesn’t bother coming up with a response. 

“Could we, uh… could we pull over?” she asks instead, grimacing and scrubbing a hand across her face. “I don’t feel too good.”

Heather eases into the shoulder obediently and Rebecca has the door open and is stumbling out of the car retching before they’ve even slowed to a complete stop.

“Nasty. You can still see the sprinkles,” Hector observes, hopping out and standing next to the remnants of her lunch on the side of the road.

Heather joins them, hands on her hips, and dutifully offers her a water bottle. “Hey. Are you going to be okay?”

Rebecca wishes she could answer that with any kind of confidence.

* * *

Heather and Hector’s house is _nice._

It’s smaller than their old refurbished crack den, sure, but it’s modern and stylish and a little offbeat, just like Heather. When they push through the front door they’re greeted by an exuberant bull terrier that pauses in its enthusiastic head butting of Hector’s shins to sit down at Rebecca’s feet and gingerly sniff at her jeans. She can’t help the initial involuntary flinch when it rushes towards her but she schools her discomfort and reluctantly bends down to pat its absurdly shaped head.

“Wow. Forget the mortgage. You guys have a _dog?_ ”

“Oh yeah. That’s Ziggy. Ziggy Stardust? You’ll probably have to fight him for the couch. He’s house-trained and super friendly, but also, like, the dumbest dog you’ll ever meet, so don’t be weirded out if he starts, like, licking the PlayStation or barking at that dumb butter commercial. I guess he just really hates emulsified animal fats, or something.”

It’s weird but it’s not super weird—she supposes her friendship with Heather has always had a relatively solid baseline that makes it well-suited to casually-pick-up-where-we-left-off in a pinch. Heather makes tacos and they sit around the hardwood table like they had occasionally done during their brief stint as housemates, Hector dominating the conversation with amusing anecdotes detailing his day. It feels _normal_ —kind of safe, and warm—but Rebecca can’t help but feel apart from it, pushing the scraps around the soft shell on her plate, barely sipping her beer, the remnants of donut still sitting like lead shrapnel in her stomach.

Heather doesn’t needle or even ask about the last two years, though, not even once, and it occurs to Rebecca with an overwhelming surge of gratitude, not for the first time, just how much she doesn’t deserve her.

After dinner she insists on doing the dishes ( _wow—prison_ changed _you_ , Heather drawls) and Heather trudges through the living room towards the couch, busying herself with tossing off the cushions and pulling out the bed. Rebecca unrolls her sleeves once she’s done and drops her pack on the ground and commences rifling through it for a change of clothes. 

“There’s food in the fridge so help yourself. I think Netflix is still mostly the same as it used to be, so you should be fine, but give us a shout if you need help figuring it out. Do you want more blankets? I have more blankets. We have a blanket box now—isn’t that wild?”

“Um. No, I think I’ll be fine,” Rebecca insists with a shake of her head. “Thank you. And Heather? Thanks for letting me crash here. I promise it’s only for a couple of nights. A week, max, and then I’ll be out of your hair. I just need a few days to sort myself out again, and I had to supply my parole officer with an address—”

“It’s fine,” Heather interrupts. “Don’t mention it. You paid my rent for a year, so. A fold out couch is the least I can do.” 

Two hours of mindless channel surfing later and she’s still wide awake, on edge. She’s considering turning off the light and trying for sleep anyway when the aforementioned butter commercial comes on and as predicted, her canine couch companion sits up straight, ears flattened back, and emits a low, warning growl beside her.

 _Everything is about to change,_ the advert advises, with a for-the-most-part-innocuous but also vaguely ominous arc of a blunt knife across white bread. 

Rebecca forces a shiver. “Huh. Well, I feel you on that one, Ziggy,” she announces, and promptly switches the set off.

She’s strategically rearranging the cushions and blankets around her when her former housemate cuts through on her way to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and when she returns Rebecca claws her way up the frame of the couch to peer at her before she can disappear back into the bedroom.

“Hey, Heather? When you guys moved, what, uh… what happened to all my stuff?”

Heather pauses and looks at her quizzically. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“Who?”

“Oh, yeah. Nathaniel put it all into storage. When Hector and I started talking about getting a new place we were gonna contact your mom to take all your things, but then Nathaniel got wind of it through WhiJo and like, said he’d take care of it. I don’t know where it ended up—you’d have to ask him.”

Rebecca lets out a deep sigh that tapers off into an unenthused groan, rolling her head back against the arm of the couch with a dull thud. 

“Of course I would.”

* * *

“Nathaniel Plimpton speaking.”

“You took my stuff?”

There’s a pause on the other end followed by a pained sigh. “How did you get this number?”

“Coerced a nurse from the hospital into giving it to me off your sign-in sheet—why? Did you change your number and not tell me on purpose?”

“Do you really want to do this, hmm? Shall we start comparing who kept what from whom, Rebecca?”

She scrunches her mouth up and closes her eyes in an attempt to tamp down on her frustration. “Look, I’ll make this easy on the both of us. I just want my stuff. Heather said you put it into storage and I just need to know where it is. Then I’ll be on my merry way and you’ll never have to talk to or see me ever again.”

“Suits me.”

“Well, fine.”

“Fine. Meet me at my old—just meet me at my apartment in an hour.”

The line goes dead before she can reply.

* * *

There’s a nauseating sense of deja vu to being back in his apartment building, standing on his doorstep, searching herself for the courage to raise her hand and just _knock_.

It turns out she doesn’t have to wrestle with herself for long, though—Nathaniel rounds the corner from the stairwell soon after, stopping in his tracks briefly when he spots her before shoving his hands deep inside his pockets on a sigh.

“Rebecca. How are you feeling?” he asks, tone cordial and polite, and it’s so far removed from the way he used to say her name—like something of a caress—that it makes her sick.

“Fine,” she says. “Still a little sore, I guess.”

He nods, then gestures past her to the door. “Shall we…?”

It takes him a moment to get the lock open, and she’s not exactly sure what she was expecting when she followed him inside but whatever it was, it wasn’t… _this._

“Wow,” she says as he closes the door with a click behind them. “This is… like the Twilight Zone, or something.”

It’s disconcertingly familiar and gut-wrenchingly alien all at once; the arrangement of the space is much the same but with notable transformations—the honeycomb shelves once lined with law journals now filled with errant stacks of pictorials and self-help books. The couch—previously his sensible but sleek leather number—replaced with her oversized futon. And to the left, no longer his wood-and-stainless-steel combo king bed but her own, neatly made up, patterned paisley bedspread and all. 

The entire formerly immaculate apartment is a confusing collection of clutter; stacks of boxes and books and other miscellaneous piles, and—the icing on an already impossible to swallow cake— _Welcome to West Covina_ billboarded across the bedhead, an eerily signposted shrine to their lives once-intertwined.

Her eyebrows knot together in the middle of her forehead. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s not much to understand. You had all this stuff with no house to put it. I had an apartment with no stuff. It made sense at the time.”

“But where’s all your stuff?”

“At my apartment in LA. Where I live.”

She shifts uncomfortably. “Oh. I bet that daily commute’s a nightmare.”

“There is no commute. I don’t work here anymore, Rebecca,” he says crisply. “Which you’d know, if you hadn’t decided to completely shut me out of your life.”

He clears his throat and keeps his gaze stubbornly down at his feet, flicking his wrists as he straightens.

She doesn’t ask. He’s made it abundantly clear she’s lost the right.

Her fingers collect dust as she trails them over the furniture, mapping it, familiar and yet not. The bed and couch are covered in plastic but most of her things bear the brunt of being undisturbed, the weight of the last two years sprinkled out over them like a salt shaker. It feels like a memory from a fast-fading dream; a wilting rose, trapped under glass.

She picks up an envelope from the coffee table, heavy with the weight of an excess of photographs she doesn’t remember printing. Turning it over in her hands she notices the name penned in the lower left corner and traces each letter in _Bianca_ with her thumb.

“What are all these?”

“They’re from Darryl,” he says, briefly touching a thumb to his brow, an idiosyncratic signposting of his discomfort that she recognises like an old friend. “I know you said you didn’t want…” He trails off, shrugging. “Darryl doesn’t always listen, when you tell him things.”

“Yeah,” she agrees wistfully, huffing out a laugh. “Yeah, I remember that about him.”

She doesn’t make it past the first picture—a candid of Heather postpartum, a tiny mass of shrivelled pink skin splayed out across her sweaty chest. Hands shaking, she shoves the photos back inside and drops the envelope back on the table where she found it, a little off-centre from its outline in the dust.

Nathaniel regards her for a long moment, and she has to turn her eyes away from his at the unexpected flash of tenderness she finds there. But then he blinks and it’s gone, his face hardening back into an expressionless mask.

“You should stay here,” he says after a second of deliberation. “For as long as you want.”

“Nathaniel—” 

“Until you get back on your feet. All this stuff is yours. The place is paid for. Someone might as well use it.”

“I don’t need your charity. You don’t have to—”

“I’m not doing you any favours,” he interrupts, tone weary and exasperated. “It’s just logic, plain and simple. Rebecca, you can either stay here or not stay here—at the end of the day it makes no difference to me. Do whatever the hell you want. You’ve always been good at that.” He twists his mouth. “Just… lock up and slide the key back under the door whenever you’re done.”

He swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing, before turning on his heel and stalking back towards the stairwell.

And just like that, all at once again, he’s gone.

* * *

Heather spots her some cash and she hates the idea of taking it, but she hates the idea of calling her mother more. Besides, Heather reiterates—she’d spotted her rent for a year, and what’s a little money-lending between friends?

She catches a bus to the outskirts of town because she’s terrified of running into anyone she knows and stocks up on as much as she can carry, which mostly translates to a lifetime’s supply of junk food condensed into six shopping bags, bursting to the brim, threatening to split open at the seams. 

The aura of the apartment is unnerving but she appreciates the kernels of comfort it provides; it takes a bit of nesting, getting things right, but her unease eases over time. Her first order of business after unveiling the lounge and the length of her bed is to slide out the television from its hiding place in the corner, wiping it down with some paper towel she finds left under the sink. With some awkward manoeuvring she manages to finagle it up onto her dresser, dragged out and against the living wall next to the door and it hums with static when she plugs it in, shaking off the hollow silence that has settled over the space ever since Nathaniel turned around and left her alone in it.

She goes to sleep with the TV on low and the brightness way down, just to drown out the quiet. It’s still early when she wakes like clockwork, eats breakfast and brushes her teeth in shower to save time. The television murmurs at her from the background as she sorts through the archaeological dig site of her old life and stuffs everything that means anything to her away under the mattress, stowed for safekeeping.

She cleans until her arms and fingers ache.

That night she finds her old iPod amongst the boxes of her belongings and agonises through the hours it takes to charge it up in full. Once it’s done she diligently untangles her earbuds and stuffs them in her ears, aching and eager, and for the first time since she’s been back on the outside, she tilts her head back against the bathroom tile and cries.

* * *

It’s a week later and she’s on the couch eating cereal for dinner in her underwear when he lets himself in. She freezes, spoon halfway to her mouth and milk dribbling down the side of her chin.

“Charming,” he says, nodding in her direction before turning to latch the door. “You know, you should keep this locked.”

She sets the bowl down next to her and drags her sleeve across her face to wipe away the remains of her evening meal. “Or maybe you could learn to knock,” she shoots, annoyed.

“You think a burglar’s going to knock? Also, this is _my_ apartment.”

“That you said I could stay in! What if I was naked?”

“Well,” he says with a wry twist of his mouth, “it wouldn’t be anything I haven’t seen before.”

He lets his gaze slide blatantly over her body to make his point, unable to help his eyes lingering on her ankle where it’s incased in black plastic and when she follows his line of vision to the tracker she shifts to tuck her legs beneath her self-consciously.

“Turns out getting lost in the desert still counts as a parole violation,” she says. She’s going for levity but it falls flat, hanging heavy and awkward between them. “Who’d have thought, right?”

He ignores her and moves towards the windows, yanking the curtains open like he’s looking for something in particular to foist his irritation on. As soon as he does she notices the striking quality to the sky—a strange, shellac-like tint, like somebody’s set the window’s Instagram filter to something vaguely vintage or warming, like _Juno_ or _Valencia_.

“There’s wildfires flaring up all the way to Alhambra. The traffic is insane. Panic stations, the entire county.”

“Oh right,” she says distractedly, still focused on the TV. “The fires. I saw them on the news. You know the one I got caught in is still going—they thought they got ahead of it but they didn’t and now it’s, like, completely out of control.”

“I was on my way back from Palm Springs but the 10 is a gridlock in both directions. All the hotels this side of Pasadena are booked solid with people running scared—”

“So you, what? Came to crash on my couch?”

“ _Your_ couch?” he scoffs, jabbing a finger in her direction. “Ha, _no._ Okay, so I get that it is technically _your_ couch, but the walls encasing the couch are very much mine and possession is still nine tenths of the law.”

Rolling her eyes as she gets to her feet, she disappears into the kitchen to dump her dishes and returns to raid his old closet for spare linen. She shoves the bundle of blankets she finds against his chest with a huff.

“Sleep on the stupid couch, Nathaniel. I don’t care. Just—stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.”

She takes his stony silence as acceptance of her terms.

* * *

“Did you pay off my hospital bills?”

“What?”

The lights are already out and she thinks he might have been halfway asleep, maybe, but she can’t help it—can’t keep her eyes shut while he’s lying there, _so close,_ and she has to know. She sits up in bed, switches on the lamp. He has one hand in the air in a _the hell?_ kind of gesture that only serves to irritate her more.

She rips the sheet off the bed, agitated and all-too-aware of her state of undress, messily shrouding herself in it as she stomps accusingly towards the couch.

“My hospital bills. I know you paid them. Why?”

Nathaniel groans and buries his face in a cushion before she can reach him. “Go back to bed, Rebecca,” he says, voice muffled by the upholstery. “I’m not doing this with you now.”

She isn’t ready to let it drop, though, and reaches out and rips the pillow right out of his arms. “Why?”

He expels a heavy breath. “Because now we’re even,” he blurts out, then tenses up immediately, clearly regretting his words.

“Excuse me?”

Drawing in air through his nose in exasperation he sits up, running his hand through his messy hair. He snatches the pillow back off her and hugs it to his bare chest as he shuffles backwards to lean against the spine of the couch.

“I kind of feel like I owe you,” he says stiffly. “Because you saved my life, I suppose. Maybe. At least you meant to. And then I didn’t get you out of it and in some weird, messed up kind of way you were in there because of me. But then you… did whatever it was you had to do, I guess, and it took awhile but I made peace with never seeing you again. But it never sat right with me, that I owed you somehow, and then the opportunity presented itself so I looked after all your stuff, I paid your bills, and I let you stay here, and now I can tell myself we’re even.”

“Wow,” she says after staring at him incredulously for a moment. “You are… really something else.”

“Was that supposed to be a thank you?” he asks as she turns and stalks back towards the bed, gathering up the trailing corners of sheet that threaten to trip her as she goes.

“I don’t know, Nathaniel. Did you ever thank me for saving your life ‘maybe, at least I meant to’? Oh my god. What the fuck.”

His hair is sticking up in all directions and she itches to fix it, itches to smooth over every complicated part of him that makes her skin crawl, that throws her off balance and doesn’t fit into her neat little life plan post-prison. 

“Why does it even matter?” he asks. “I thought I was doing you a favour.”

“We don’t _do_ favours, remember?”

She throws herself back onto the mattress, teeming with an overwhelming frustration and no closer to falling asleep. She was wrong, she realises. 

Sometimes knowing things feels worse.

* * *

He can smell her shampoo, and the scent memory triggers something purposeful in his sleep-addled brain.

They’re sprawled out together and still half-dozing after a long night of enthusiastic lovemaking, uninhibited from the weekday confines of his 6 a.m. alarm. Nathaniel’s never been one to linger in bed any longer than what was strictly necessary, but the promise of lazy mornings spent curled up alongside her—adorably sex-rumpled, smiling and soft—just might be enough to start slowly but surely changing his mind.

His hands start to go searching, loose and languid and wanting to pull her firmly against him, so he can feel the warm fit of her body on his and nose his way deep into her hair and inhale. They come up empty, though, and as he comes closer to consciousness the ghost of her golden skin dissipates into the dust motes dancing in the morning half-light and reality creeps soberingly in; he’s not in his bed at all but on Rebecca Bunch’s couch, in his old apartment, and when he opens his eyes he’s staring directly at the back of her uncombed head.

Her hair’s lighter than it was the last time he saw her, _before—_ closer to how he remembers it from when he first met her but duller, less honeyed; longer, too, but the ends a little jagged, like someone’s hacked at them with the wrong type of scissors.

She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor and using the front of the sofa as a backrest, stuffing her face with popcorn as she watches the television with the volume on low. 

He heaves out a heavy sigh and she flinches, though from the sound or the tickle of it against the back of her neck he isn’t sure.

“I see your eating habits haven’t changed.”

The words are out of his mouth before he can consider their bad taste; Rebecca to her credit chooses not to call him out on it, instead pushing the bowl of popcorn away.

“Good morning to you, too,” she says flatly. 

He flings out a hand over the arm of the couch to pat around on the side table for his phone. 

“The interstate is closed,” she adds when he sits up. “So good luck getting back to LA.”

Stiff from his night on the couch and cranky for lack of caffeine he ignores her, fingers jamming agitatedly at his phone for digital confirmation. She’s right, of course. He’s got the news articles and unimpressed messages from his dad to prove it.

He swings his legs down and retrieves his blue dress shirt from the back of the couch, killing two birds with one stone and stretching as he slides his arms into each sleeve. If he takes the backroads and really guns it maybe he can still make it before lunch time. Cut through La Habra, maybe. Hell, he’ll go via Long Beach if he has to—anything to get him out of this godforsaken town.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. It’s—” He makes a show of looking at his smart watch. “—seven twenty-three, and check out time at this hotel is half past, so I’ll be on my way.”

“Well, good,” she says, kind of rudely, then surprises him when she follows him to the door. “Wait. Aren’t you going to eat something first?”

He raises his eyebrows in the direction of her popcorn bowl and barks out a sardonic laugh as he finishes buttoning his shirt. “No.”

“Shower?”

“They have showers in LA, actually. I think I can survive until then.”

“Right.”

She lingers in the doorway once he passes through it, her foot dragging circles on the floor, and he hates the weird feeling it creates in his chest—something a lot like guilt only sadder, like he shouldn’t be finding it so easy to just turn around and leave. 

She looks _lonely_ , he realises.

“Have a nice life, Rebecca,” he says.

(He doesn’t sound as much like an asshole as he hoped. Almost like he meant it, even.)

* * *

He’s coughing, when he comes back, but this time he knocks at least, so when she swings the door open to let him inside she lets the _I told you so_ snipe die on the tip of her tongue.

“It’s… bad,” he says, and she thinks his eyes might be watering as he makes a beeline straight for the kitchen.

He moves towards the fridge then stops himself, glancing at her furtively until she waves her permission. 

“It’s chaos, out there,” he adds around chugging down a bottle of water, gesturing wildly with his free hand. “Hazy as hell. People careening around like idiots. You just about need a respirator to breathe.” He coughs again. “God. The smell’s going to be in my car for weeks.”

“Worst fires on record,” she confirms. “A hundred and forty nine dead already. That’s worse than the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, FYI. You know. Just as a measure of like, general badness.”

“The what?”

She shakes her head. “Unimportant, don’t worry about it. Anyway—the roads are all closed?”

“Far as I can tell. Seems like the easiest thing to do is wait it out, anyway. They should have it under control soon.”

The fridge door clangs as he fishes for another bottle, and Rebecca can’t help but remember the last time the two of them were here like this, in his kitchen. Her dipping and laughing in disbelief when she’d found things other than fruit in there, things he’d bought just for her. The way he’d wrapped his arms around her from behind—unusual, for him to initiate the contact, but becoming increasingly common behind closed doors—and nosed her hair away to kiss her neck. _It’s just logical_ , she’s pretty sure he’d shrugged back then, too. Always so logical, always so serious until he wasn’t, and more often than not something he reserved just for her.

Two days later she’d stood in the living room and told him she couldn’t be with him, and now she thinks idly of all the foodstuffs in his fridge he would have had to waste, collateral damage in her quest for self enlightenment.

His eyes are on the handle when she looks at him, and she wonders what he’s thinking. Wonders if it’s about lunch meats and mayonnaise and his hands on her waist for him, too.

“So you’re staying again, then?” she asks, far more composed than she feels.

“Just one more night, until they get it under control. I’ll be out of here as soon as the roads are clear. This is the las—” Her eyes flit to his and he falters, swallowing back the words he’d been poised to say that still felt so much like second nature. “It won’t happen again.”

Deep down inside, some part of her already knows that he’s wrong.

* * *

There’s not much to do in the evening, it turns out, so he gives her his credit card to open a new Netflix account.

They hadn't watched many movies in the brief time they’d spent together—started a few, certainly, but never properly watched—predictably concerned with other things like finding each other’s ticklish spots, the spots that made the other’s back arch and toes curl, the spots that made them squeal and squirm and shudder.

He muses on that information now, the un-erasable knowledge he has fused into his synapses about the sensitive stretch of skin beneath her ear from which he could always activate her shallow breathing with his teeth; considers the notch on her spine that would send her undulating above him without fail if he dug in gently with his fingers _just so._ If she feels his eyes on her she doesn’t acknowledge it, for all appearances enraptured by whatever drama is unfolding onscreen, oblivious to his somewhat bitter trip down memory lane beside her.

He still remembers what she looks like shattering into a million pieces on the tip of his tongue—can practically still feel the cinch of her trembling thighs around his head like a vice as she falls apart, his eyes sliding up the swell of her stomach, past the valley of her breasts and on to to the pale curve of her throat as she twists back on the pillow, keening, undone.

He’s never known another person as intimately as he knows Rebecca, and he’s never quite forgiven her for making him feel so many things only to wrench it all away.

And it’s not that he’s spent the last two years pining—he hasn’t—but he hasn’t exactly bothered making a show of pretending he’s interested in pursuing that particular brand of intimacy with anybody else again, either. Not after the last time, and what happened with Mona. Life has been good. Work has been good. Intermittent slews of no-strings sex has been… adequate. His day-to-day existence had been perfectly fine pre-Rebecca Bunch and it was perfectly fine post-Rebecca, too. Was going to remain fine, just as soon as the roads opened up again and he could get back to his busy LA life, with a clear head unswayed by the smell of that damn shampoo.

Except two days pass, and things only get worse.

Nathaniel spends half of it on the phone, arguing with his dad, apologising to clients. He borrows her old computer to work remotely and doesn’t comment when it connects to the building’s wifi automatically; she tries her best to ignore him, the way he complains about how outdated it feels taking her back to the eight months they spent sharing an office with his water polo ball driving her quietly crazy every time it bounced against the wall.

He ventures out once for food and doesn’t bother trying again. He has to drive ten miles to find a market that’s still open and even then the pickings are slim—shelves bare of fresh food for lack of deliveries, canned goods similarly depleted as people buckle down to weather the storm. 

The headline on the morning news is _WILDFIRE APOCALYPSE_ , the entire bulletin splashed with a glowing red that he sees reflected in Rebecca’s eyes from where she sits too close to the television. She becomes a walking encyclopaedia on the outside conditions—hotspots, wind speeds, particulate matter; a 412 on the Air Quality Index, she tells him. The highest it’s ever been. Napa was a 404 back in 2017 and that had been so high they had to add another layer to the chart. Stay inside, is what he takes away from it. Stay inside if you want to be able to breathe.

“You’re going to get square eyes, staring at that thing all the time,” he calls out accusingly in her direction. “Since when do you watch so much television, anyway?”

_“The moment experts have been fearing the past two weeks has arrived, with the Santa Ana Winds fighting their way in from the north and exacerbating the innumerous wildfires currently raging uncontrollably across Southern California. Conditions mimic those currently being experienced in Florida, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Texas and Washington. A state of emergency has already been declared in—”_

Finally, _finally,_ she switches it off irritably. “Seriously, Gavin? You couldn’t have considered a career change in the last three years?”

He tracks her with his eyes as she moves around the apartment, gathering up containers—a vase, a pot plant holder, a porcelain dish she kept her jewellery in. One by one she takes them into the kitchen then deposits them, full of water, on the dining room table until there’s no room left for any more. There’s a clanging noise from the next room, decidedly metallic, and not long after she starts coming back with pots and pans, water sloshing over the edges as she carries them.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“On the news they said we should fill up the bathtub with cold water,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“This apartment doesn’t _have_ a bathtub.”

“Yeah, some kind of bachelor’s pad this is.”

“Bachelors don’t take baths,” he shoots at her retreating back. “We take showers. Manly showers.”

“Cold showers,” she mutters, depositing the next full saucepan on the floor with the others.

(The power goes out around midday. It doesn’t come back on.)

* * *

She takes stock of every edible item in the apartment, sorts them out in order of perishability. 

The milk won’t last the day with the power still off so she drinks directly from the carton as she surveys her stockpile. The bagels will need to go first. There’s two-minus-two-packets boxes of blueberry Eggos, one plain. A few sachets of microwave popcorn—not of much use sans electricity, but maybe they can make do with the gas stove if it comes down to it. Two variety packs of Cheetos and Doritos. A pantry packet of Slim Jims. The selection of protein bars she’d had stuffed in her rucksack for sustenance. Some chocolate. A box of buffalo wing flavoured Cheez-Its, seven red velvet Pop Tarts and a giant jar of peanut butter.

Not exactly the most nutritional selection, but in terms of shelf-life, she supposes, she’s not doing so bad.

“Somebody’s gotten good at squirrelling things away,” Nathaniel remarks from the couch, peering over at her from underneath the disinterested elbow he’s slung across his face.

“What, is that supposed to be a Jew joke?” she snips at him, not even sparing him a glance.

“A felon joke, actually.” He rolls his eyes and sits up. “So what’s the deal with all the Scooby Snacks, Shaggy?”

“My first trip to the grocery store may have gotten a little sentimental,” she says defensively. “But you’ll be thanking me later.”

“You say that like there’s a single thing there I’d be willing to touch with a ten-foot pole.”

“Suit yourself,” she says, and makes a show of biting unceremoniously into a Slim Jim.

* * *

It figures that right when Rebecca’s about to get her life together, right when she’s about to start over and fresh, the world decides to fall apart.

“We’re going to die,” she says tonelessly, eyes vacant. “The world’s ending and we’re going to die here, in this weird mishmash apartment, and I’m never going to be able to smooth things over with Paula, or my mom, or—”

She swallows back the end of her sentence when he meets her eyes, and they both know the next word was going to be _you._

“The world isn’t ending,” he scoffs with false bravado, in an attempt to lighten the mood. “California has forest fires every year. So this one’s a little out of control—so what? They’ll put it out eventually. They always do.”

“What, you think because your daddy’s a Republican you’re immune to climate change? Weren’t you paying attention to the guy on the news? Half the country is on fire right now. The air quality is the worst it’s been in… well, the history of ever, basically. People can’t evacuate because there’s nowhere to evacuate _to._ ”

The way he works his jaw back and forth tells her that she’s got him, and he’s not happy about it.

She shakes her head, willing herself to focus on anything other than her own mortality. “Who cares about us, anyway? We can fend for ourselves. But Darryl has Bianca, and Madison—god, how old is she now?—and Paula has her kids, and Heather—Heather has a _dog_ ,” she says, eyes wide. 

“You need to calm down,” he says, and she thinks he would have learned his lesson on that one by now.

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” she snaps back automatically, incensed. “My emotions are not yours to censor. My feelings exist irrespective of your validation.”

“Is this a therapy bit? Do those words actually mean something to you?”

She pictures herself wrapping her hands around his throat and applying the appropriate amount of pressure to get him to shut up. It’s somewhat effective; the tension eases from her shoulders and she composes herself with a sigh, sinking back into the couch with every intention of ignoring him for the rest of the afternoon.

Until the quiet’s interrupted by the sound of his stomach, gurgling loudly, and he claps his hand over it with an irritated grimace.

The Snickers bar hits him hard in the back of the head.

“Eat some fucking junk food, you stubborn, arrogant _douchebag,_ ” she says, and he swears he sees her lips twitch, just a little.

* * *

That night his dreams are soaked in irony and intimacy:

“Mmm, so what did you think? Let me guess—needed more musical numbers, right?”

They’d been watching the latest big-budget disaster movie as a Netflix new release, all special effects and little substance, starring whichever up and coming bright young things had been deemed on trend for the season. It was significant in the sense that it was the first (and last, but only for lack of trying) time they’d actually made it through an entire film without segueing into something else part-way, content for once with snuggling into each other’s sides for the evening instead.

“No,” Rebecca had said with an eye roll, leaning into him as he’d stretched and shut the laptop. “It was good. Scientifically inaccurate, mostly. But enjoyable enough.”

“Oh, okay. I didn’t realise extreme weather patterns was one of your areas of expertise. They offer that as an elective at Harvard?”

Grinning into him, she let her eyes flicker shut in contentment as he rubbed lazy patterns over her shoulder blade.

“Anyway. When an inescapable superstorm comes for mankind, this is the safest possible place to be, right?” she said absently, already lulling towards sleep. “We don’t have weather here. Except for, you know.”

“Except for what?”

“The Santa Anas.”

“Ah.” 

His eyes tracked predictably to her mouth at that, confirming his continued presence on the exact same horny wavelength. Helpless to resist the impulse despite the fatigue, she craned up towards him, happily closing the distance between his lips and hers.

“Your apartment would be the worst possible place to be stuck in an apocalypse, though.”

“In what way, exactly? Sea levels are rising at an alarming rate and I live on the third floor.”

“West Covina is _two hours_ from the beach.”

“Twenty minutes, in a global warming-induced Armageddon.”

She scoffed. “The only thing you have in your fridge is green vegetables. You don’t buy anything with a shelf-life of longer than three days. Once the power goes out, we’re dead in a week.”

“ _You_ live in refurbished crack den.”

“Yeah, so my house has already proven itself to be somewhat fireproof, _plus_ my housemate is a champion-level bowman, so. The Hunger Games are already in the bag.”

He twisted up onto his side, humming, curling around her and dipping down to press a soft kiss to her collarbone.

“You don’t trust me to look after you?” he murmured quietly, voice low and vaguely flirtatious.

“Please. You think I need looking after? Besides, what are you going to do? Ward off mortal enemies with your water polo ball?”

“Well,” he said with a self-important tip of his head, “not to be braggy, but I _am_ a pretty accurate shot. What are you going to do? Stab them with a pen?”

“Worked on you.”

He silenced her then with his mouth on hers, the hand not caught up in her curls and helping him support his body weight sliding down the satin of her dark blue slip to skim her curves and settle itself in the dip of her waist.

“You smell good,” he mumbled against the skin of her throat, sucking lightly at her pulse point and working his way down.

“I probably smell like _you_ ,” she protested. 

“Mmm, even better. I’ve claimed you as my own.”

“Gross.” She rolled her eyes, threading her fingers through the crest of his hair and combing it back from disarray into its usual side-swoop. “I can see it now—just you, me, a small collection of writing instruments and your little yellow ball. The zombies won’t stand a chance.”

“We’ll be practically unstoppable,” he agreed, rolling onto his back and taking her with him.

Then she’d laughed—a light, melodic tinkling sound that made him feel like he’d just inhaled sunshine, the brightness of it billowing right through him—and rested her chin on her hands, piled neatly on top of one another on his chest. The answering fondness swelling inside his ribcage as she bit down on her lip and smiled at him had taken him by surprise, but he hadn’t dwelled on that too long, content to blindly bask in the warmth of whatever it was she was offering him.

Until she’d rescinded it, all of it, and he’d smarted with the shame of thinking it was ever even his to start with.

* * *

He wakes to the acrid burn of smoke in his nostrils and his throat, one of the overhead smoke alarms apparently clinging to the last of its battery power long enough to sound a pathetic wail in warning. His first foggy thought is Rebecca, his arms reaching for her out of repressed habit but coming up empty, and when he pushes himself bleary eyed up onto his elbows on the couch he can’t see her on the bed, either. Once he discerns the soft grey haze is filtering out from the kitchen he scrambles to his feet in a panic.

She’s flattened against the wall when he finds her, eyes wide and vacant as she stares at the sink where the flames are already starting to lick up the wall. When he calls her name she’s unresponsive. He tries again, rougher this time.

“ _Rebecca._ ”

She snaps out of it, then, coughing and crumpling against him before mirroring his movements and tucking her mouth into the crook of her elbow.

“The water,” she chokes out, batting helplessly at the smoke. “There’s no water coming out.”

He nudges her aside and goes for the rug in the entryway, pushing past her to get back to the sink and slapping at it with the heavy fabric until he’s managed to smother most of it out, the sides of it singeing in the heat but the lack of oxygen ultimately winning out. When the smoulder is contained to the basin again he returns with one of her saucepans of water, extinguishing the remnants with an angry hiss against the stainless steel.

He drops the pot in the sink with an aggressive clank before turning back to face her.

She hasn’t moved from the spot the entire time, still stood frozen and numb, and he grunts in annoyance before hoisting her into his arms and carrying her out of the smoky kitchen over his shoulder, finally waking her up.

“Put me down,” she growls, pummelling him angrily with her fists. “I’m fucking serious. Put me down, you asshole.”

He deposits her unceremoniously back on her feet near the foot of the bed, sidestepping before she can hit him again and raising his hands defensively.

“Are you insane? What was that?”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I was stupid. I wasn’t thinking.”

“What were you even doing? Did you start that fire on purpose?”

He notices the way she’s favouring her left arm, tucking it into her chest and his nostrils flare as he snatches at it, yanking her closer so he can see.

“Ow!”

“You burned yourself? Jesus Christ, Rebecca.”

Grip like iron around her elbow he drags her over to the dining table where she’s been keeping her collection of makeshift water vessels; tripping over her own feet from the angry force of him Rebecca yelps, aiming a protesting kick towards his shins in self-defence but stumbling in the process, coming to an abrupt stop when he shoves her forearm down into the portable foot spa Valencia had gifted her as a pre-wedding present so many moons ago.

“Stop it, you’re hurting me,” she snaps, and only then does he let her go, her skin imprinted faintly with red where he’d been holding her.

“Oh, sorry, _I’m_ hurting you? You seem to be doing a pretty good job of that yourself.”

She scowls, but keeps her hand submersed in the tub anyway, the room-temperature water for the most part ineffectual at soothing any of the sting.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and tries to calm himself, tries to breathe through his heart beating hard like it’s going to break through his chest on overdrive. They’re both a little panicked, he knows; fraught with fire-related tension and highly strung, and as his pulse slows back to a steady throb he feels the shame creep in at adding to her distress—it’s never been his intention to frighten her. His own brief flare of terror still strums insistently in his fingertips, though, and he can’t keep the accusation out of his voice.

“What the hell, Rebecca?” he demands. “You are _crazy_. You could have gotten us both _killed._ ”

“I know! I am crazy. I’m losing my fucking mind, Nathaniel. Because I’ve spent the last three years of my life behind bars and now I’m finally out I’m just trapped all over again. I just want to start over but I can’t, because I’m stuck in this stupid town, and now I’m stuck in this stupid apartment with all this stuff, with you, and with all these reminders of everything I’ve missed and I feel like I can’t _breathe_.” She pulls her arm out of the flooded foot spa and gestures erratically at her chest, sending out a spray of dislodged droplets, eyes wild and wide and welling with tears. “I'm suffocating and I don’t want to be in here anymore. I can’t…”

She lets out a strangled sob before promptly bursting into tears, crumpling forward, collapsing against him and burying her head in his chest. Force of nature that she is it’s so easy to forget how small she is until she’s tucked against him, over a head of height difference and two years of uneasy silence between them.

“Please. I just—I just want to get out of here,” she hiccups into his shirt, hands fisting in the fabric. “I feel like I can’t—”

“Breathe,” he says quietly, cradling the back of her head on autopilot. “Hey. Just breathe.”

He’s never really consoled anybody before but it seems like he’s doing something right; her hand not nursing the burn pulls tighter at his shirtfront but her choked sobs ease somewhat, her breathing eventually slowing into synchronisation with the gentle back and forth of his palm across her shoulder blades. For a half-second he thinks he should be disgusted by way she’s snivelling into his shirt but the disdain never comes; all he feels is an unexpected rush of latent tenderness for her and the overwhelming urge to encase her firmly in his arms.

She’s embarrassed, so embarrassed, not just about the fire but the hopeless way she’s clinging to him and she can’t bring herself to let go because she doesn’t want to see his face or let him look at hers, doesn’t want to look at anything in the apartment for a moment longer. Her nostrils fill with the familiar scent of him as she inhales deeply, shakily, and crushes her nose into his collarbone.

“You’ve been through a lot, Rebecca,” he murmurs into the crown of her head. “You’re going to survive this too. I promise.”

It’s the softness in his voice that finally gives her the courage to pull away, rubbing the back of her palm across her snotty nose and glancing up at him with wet, abashed eyes. 

He steps back but moves his hands to her waist, holding her gently as if he’s not entirely convinced she can keep herself upright.

“Truce?” she surprises herself by offering with an ungraceful sniff, not much more than a mumble but he hears it all the same.

There's a beat, and then he drops his arms away from her and nods. “Truce.”

His eyes don’t leave her back as he stands there mutely, watching her make her way across the room to rummage through some boxes in the corner until she finds what she’s looking for and turns back to face him.

She sniffs again, and raises the bottle.

“Drink some three year old tequila with me?”

* * *

“You’re too long to play this game.”

“Excuse me?”

She takes another swig and pulls a face that isn’t entirely tequila related, gesturing in his general direction.

“Your limbs are too long. Like, _absurdly_ long. No one’s legs have any business being that long. When you’re wearing pants it’s not so bad but now you’re half naked it’s, like, all I can think about.”

“Really,” he says with a smirk. “My bare legs are all you can think about.”

“Shut up.”

She makes a childish face at him and for a brief moment it’s like they’ve gone back in time—she’s stolen his Stanford shirt to wear and is eating Chinese food bare-legged and barefoot on his living room rug, teasing him, always teasing him. He’d never really liked being teased before Rebecca; it made him feel prickly, defensive, always. When Rebecca teased him he felt warm inside, like the smile that went with it was a secret she’d manufactured just for him. He blinks and it’s gone, though—it’s not his shirt she’s wearing but her own, and the mirth doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

The Strip Boggle had been her idea, of course, for reasons she insisted were entirely pragmatic. It was _hot_ with no aircon and hellfire raging outside, the alcohol definitely not helping.

“I’ll let you cool off,” she’d said, “when I wipe the floor with your ass.”

Contrary to her unwavering confidence, they’re reasonably evenly matched. He lets her get cocky with the first two rounds, but he wins the two after that. The game falters, then, on a draw—they’re both down to their underwear and not really ready for what follows that, stuck in a high-tension stand-off.

“The fire this morning,” he begins, watching the curious way she tenses and intensely studies her glass. “You were burning Darryl’s photos? Why? I don’t get it. What happened?”

She’s hugging her stuffed alligator to her chest for modesty and it’s blatant cheating but he goes easy on her, lets her have it.

“She was always kind of this abstract concept to me,” she says tonelessly. “And she was born the same night I got arrested, so I never even got to see her, and that was fine. It made it easier, to pretend like it was one decent thing that I managed to not fuck up for once in my life, and forget about the fact that she was an actual person that I helped create, that I gifted half my fucked up DNA.”

“Rebecca,” he chides.

“It’s true. BPD is linked to genetics, and I just handed over half the recipe to my messed up brain chemistry to some unsuspecting kid.”

“That girl will never feel unloved a day in her life,” he insists, with an emphatic dip of his head, emboldened by the ethanol in his bloodstream. “Not if Darryl can help it. Or Josh. Or Paula. Or any of the other people she has around her.” He’s stupid, so stupid when he reaches out and catches one of her tears with the pad of this thumb, stomach clenching at the way she holds her breath at the contact and tries so hard not to lean into his touch. “You did an incredibly selfless thing.”

“No I didn’t!” she snaps, pushing to her feet and pushing him away, all at once a tightly-wound ball of fury gesticulating at him wildly, simmering in the middle of their hybrid living room in nothing but her nude coloured underwear. “It wasn’t selfless. It was selfish; it was one hundred percent selfish. I’d just pushed you away and I’d ruined Valencia’s party and I felt stupid and broken and I hated myself, and I wanted to make myself feel good.”

The photos she burned weren’t just of Bianca but of her, too—her as a little girl, innocent, unassuming and whole. Her and her dad; her first heartbreak, waiting to happen.

“She looks like me,” she says in a quiet voice. She wipes hastily at her face. “When I was that age, I mean. She looks just like me. At least I think she does—maybe I’m just projecting. I don’t know. But I wasn’t expecting that.” She shakes her head, sniffing. “I get how genes work. I just—”

“I get it,” he says gently.

The fight fades out of her as suddenly as it formed, her shoulders sagging with emotional exhaustion.

“You should sleep in the bed,” she says after a moment. She gestures loosely at the couch. “Who knows how long we’re stuck here, and you barely fit on that thing.” 

He hesitates, and she rolls her eyes. 

“No more favours. Just… logic. Sleep in the bed or don’t, Nathaniel. It makes no difference to me.”

* * *

They lie side by side in the bed they’ve both slept in but never together; the cosy few weeks they’d had before she’d called it quits had been shacked up together here in his apartment, in his bed—they’d never bothered with her bed in her house, where she had a housemate, where there were workbooks and therapy schedules and reminders there was a world outside his walls. They’d stumbled there drunk and melancholy after forming words started becoming a struggle, in-game and out. She throws an arm across her eyes to block out the way the room is starting to spin, but it barely helps.

Nathaniel rubs his thumb and forefinger across the lip of the empty tequila bottle before relegating it to the night stand, sliding back down onto the pillows, limbs heavy but bloodstream alight with liquid courage. His voice is rough when he speaks again.

“Are you home? Alone?”

“What?”

He swallows, scrunching his eyes shut. “‘Are you home? Alone?’—that’s the last message you ever sent me. Three years ago.”

The words settle like lead weights on her chest, constricting her, restricting her capacity to draw in air.

“Nathaniel,” she says quietly. A warning and a plea. “Don’t.”

“You sent me that message and then I didn’t hear from you. Not a word—after I told you I wanted us to be together. I didn’t hear from you and then you were with him—Trent—and I thought you’d moved on and you didn’t want me. So I moved on with Mona, like I thought I was supposed to. Like I told myself I wanted to. But Trent wasn’t real.”

She sighs. “Is there supposed to be a question in there?”

“Was this whole thing… were the last three years… meant to go a different way?”

She’s had a lot of time to think about that, it turns out.

For the first few months she’d thought of little else—lonely and overwhelmed and left so alone with her thoughts, wondering what difference it could have made if she’d stayed, if she’d tried, if she’d been strong enough to knock on his door. Left heavy from having him sit across from her in the visitation room and seeing the resentment in his face from the way she’d deviated from their plan, from the way she’d gone and made her mind up without him all over again. 

“No,” she chokes out eventually, the word like shards of shattered glass in her mouth. “I’m sorry. I wish I could say that were true but I can’t. That had nothing to do with Trent and everything to do with me. I wasn’t ready.”

He nods and sinks back into the bed. “Okay.”

After a quiet moment he shifts closer and turns to face her, his heavy-lidded eyes bloodshot and somber and unexpectedly reverent. 

“You were always my favourite,” he mumbles, lips poking out in a kind of pout as he drags his pointer finger through one of her curls where it rests on the pillow, separating out the strands.

“Hmm?” When he doesn’t respond she twists her head to look at him, and his breath is hot where it fans out across her face. “Your favourite what?”

“My favourite person.”

Her heart feels like it beats too hard into her ribcage and fucking _bruises_ at that, all burst capillaries blossoming in violent reds and purples beneath the skin. 

“You have a favourite person? You hate people.”

“I liked you. Loved you, even.”

It’s searing now, crimson and bright-hot vermillion, seeping through scarred tissue, and she can’t stop herself from asking because she’s always, _always_ been selfish and maybe a little mean.

“Loved?” She swallows. “Past tense?”

He manages to hold her gaze for a few seconds before rolling his eyes away from her, settling on to his back.

“I think,” he says slowly, his words thick and heavy and fuzzy around the edges, “that at some point in the last two years, you lost the right to ask that question.”

She knows she deserves it, but it doesn’t stop the sting. 

The tequila starts to sit like jagged little rocks in her stomach, its heat dissipating into nauseating hollowness; she hazards one last glance at Nathaniel—his jaw tight and slightly unfocused sightline still fixated firmly on the ceiling—before turning away from him, burying her face into her pillow, swallowing back the promise of tears and praying for sleep.

* * *

They’re wary of each other the next day, both hungover and a little cranky.

Nathaniel returns to his staked-out territory by the couch, busying himself with push-ups and sit-ups and squats against the wall and Rebecca makes it abundantly clear she isn’t in the mood for talking, earbuds in even though she’s got the sound off, saving battery, busying herself with reading a book on Buddhism. They’ve had more than a little practice at sitting across from one another, ignoring tension. And Rebecca’s had three long years to come to terms with the concept of boredom.

The evening comes and he hesitates, clearly unsure if her earlier offer has been revoked in light of the way they’ve left things until she jerks her chin pointedly towards his side of the bed, indicating for him to join her. He slides in next to her, slipping under the sheet and leaving it pooled down low around his waist. 

When she catches him looking over at her he tears his gaze away, clearing his throat.

“Well, goodnight,” he says, extinguishing the Valencia-scented candle on the side table and settling down.

She lies there in the quiet dark and tries not to think about him stretched out beside her; pretends she can’t feel his radiating body heat emanating from across the mattress, beckoning.

“You were holding my hand,” she says suddenly, and it’s barely above a whisper but it sounds so loud in the silent space between them.

“Huh? Also—oh, you’re talking to me now?”

“No,” she says quickly. Then, after a beat, “When I woke up in the hospital and you were there—you were holding my hand. You could have just come in and ID’ed me and left and I would have been none the wiser but you stayed. You stayed and you were holding my hand.”

It was the last place that he’d touched her two years ago, too, and she hasn’t forgotten that, either.

He hadn’t known it at the time but she had, the decision already mostly fully formed in the back of her mind and made solidified the tighter she’d succumbed and gripped him back. 

Their visits had been occasionally terse and often guarded, since the hearing when she’d gone so stupidly off-script, but he’d come every fortnight like clockwork—she gave him that. His track record of reading a room when it came to her wasn’t exactly perfect but at some point in the eight months they’d spent clinging to each other amongst the stationery in the supply closet he’d learned her something like a language; he’d sensed something was off in the inflection of her and he’d conjugated, long fingers wrapping around hers in question as much as comfort, and she’d allowed herself the selfish moment of savouring his touch before tearing her hand away. 

“Every time I think I’ve finally accepted things and moved on, you find another way to make me feel like I’m losing you all over again,” he says eventually, voice low and uneven. “Whether it’s running away to New York, or overdosing on pills, or telling me it’s over, or pleading guilty to attempted murder, or walking headfirst _into a fucking forest fire_ , Rebecca. And I let it get to me, every single time.”

And _oh._ She doesn’t have an answer for that.

They sleep curled together but not touching, his body echoing the curvature of hers with an arm’s length between them until he’s almost asleep and jostled awake by her reaching back to tangle her hand in his, lacing their fingers and tucking them behind her at her tailbone.

* * *

He wakes with the old-familiar smell of her in his nostrils and it would be easy, so easy, to close his eyes and pretend the last three years never happened, pretend like some part of her still belongs solely to him, like they’re waking up together after a night of sex and laughing rather than stirring with a distance strung out between them so tangible he feels like he could reach out and touch it.

They’re closer than they fell asleep, having migrated somewhat in the night but his hand is still warm where she’s kept it wrapped in hers and clasped up against the small of her back and she shifts now, spine arching slightly and squeezing his palm as a reflex. He swallows, caught off guard by the way his stomach clenches in on itself at the gesture and the way she drags their entwined fingers up her side to rest above her hip so that he’s almost-but-not-quite got an arm slung around her waist. Going completely still, he finds himself holding his breath, waiting for her to come properly to and pull away. The moment never arrives, though—Rebecca buries her head further into the pillow and falls stationary and silent, save for the soft chuff of her even breathing against the cotton.

He’s in the process of willing himself back towards a state of slumber when he feels it; his eyes snap open at the sensation he’s not sure he imagined until it happens again and he can see the minuscule motion clearly for himself—the soft pad of Rebecca’s thumb swiping itself feather-light across the back of his hand. The result of his awareness is electric; his every surrounding molecule called to prickly attention by the caress of her skin on his as she repeats it, a barely-there back-and-forth that has his entire system humming to life like a refuelled engine. He can’t help it when his own grip on her tightens, can’t help the tension flooding through his body and pulling him out into a line and taut like copper wire, desperate and ductile.

She crooks her index finger and when the tip of her nail grazes his hypersensitive palm a muted, strangled noise claws its way up out of his oesophagus unbidden.

Rebecca freezes. He’s sure he’s ruined it, now—sure she’s going to recoil and snatch herself back but instead she surprises him by letting out a breath and tugging his arm tighter around her, inching back on the mattress until they’re properly spooning, digging his knuckles into the soft, exposed skin of her belly. He lets out another half-moan at the snug tuck of her body into his and there’s no way she isn’t aware of what she’s doing to him, nestled as she is against him.

At the exact same instant he makes to cautiously nose his way into the crease of her neck she turns, staring right at him, through him with her pupils blown impossibly wide, and there’s a stretch of agonising seconds where neither of them moves.

The kiss starts out tentative, reserved—like she’s trying to remember the exact motion of her mouth against his, the pressure of it focused further up where her nose digs into his cheek rather than at the light touch of their lips. He can feel the hard crease of her brow, her eyes scrunched tightly shut as if physically pains her, being here, doing this again; he can’t help it, his palms get greedy and come up to her face on autopilot, pulling her properly into him until he’s tasting her almost entirely on muscle memory alone. Her hand drifts haltingly up his shoulder, restless but hesitant until a surge of determination has her anchoring it tightly in his hair and suddenly she’s holding nothing back, moaning hopelessly into his mouth as she crushes him into her.

He twists them until they’re both on their sides facing each other, on equal footing, his hand woven through her hair and her leg hooked up over his, holding them together and keeping their mouths firmly sealed. She makes a noise in the back of her throat every time he inadvertently tips his hips into hers, pressing into her, making her his mould. If he closes his eyes he can’t see the gauntness in her face, the limpness of her hair—she smells the same and tastes the same and kisses mostly the same, even if it’s more hard edges than he’s used to.

Slipping a hand beneath her shirt, he cups her where she’s bare, thumbing gently at her nipple. She mewls and arches in response, using the leg hitched over his hip to brace herself to his body, and every molecule that composes him hums with the same excited heartbeat. His hand leaves her breast and slides down her side, across the expanse of her back, flattening her to him with a firm press between her shoulder blades, mouths still locked together like they’re each other’s sole source of air.

Rebecca’s tugging his shirt up over his head before he can think about it and he acquiesces, shuddering at the heat of her hands on his chest even in the stuffy air of the apartment until his brain starts to catch up and he hesitates, lips unlocking from hers with an ungraceful smack. 

“Hey,” he pants. “Slow down. We should—”

“Shut up,” she says, reaching for the drawstring at his waist. “We’re not talking, remember?”

He wishes he could do that. _God,_ does he wish he could do that—fall back into bed with her like it’s nothing, greet her body like an old friend and just weather the inevitable awkwardness afterward. The problem is he’s been through believing he was getting her out of his system before, and it never for a moment went quite the way he planned.

He lets her derail him for a sweet stretch of seconds where he considers giving in, unable to think of much else than her mouth on his and her hands reaching for him through his pants. But then he manages to steel himself, pulling back, gasping, and stilling her hands with his own because he has to know this means more to her than just cabin fever.

“Hey, no. If we do this, you don’t get to just bow out again. You don’t get to fuck me and change your mind. Not when I wanted to go slow and you pushed. Not when I tried to move on. You don’t get to… open me up and then shut me out again.”

She won’t meet his eyes, her hand on his neck determined to drag him back down but he resists, which is new for him, because he’s never, not once until now, been able to stop himself from giving her what she wants.

“No. Look at me. Not until you say it.”

Her cheeks are flushed pink with want and frustration, her lips stained and swollen and he stares at them, hopeful, waiting for the words he needs her to say to make where this whole thing is headed okay. They don’t come, though—her gaze remaining elusive and downcast as she heaves for breath beneath him, warring with herself.

She presses gently at his chest until he rolls off her, desperate to ignore the painful way his eyes fall shut in resignation. The mattress dips as she moves to the edge of the bed, swinging a leg over and hugging the other one up to her body, curling in on herself.

“Why do you have to make everything into such a big deal? Why can’t we just be two people that are really good at having sex with each other? Stop trying to make it into something it’s not. Stop being such a baby. God.” She sniffs and barks out a bitter laugh, tugging down her t-shirt where it’s ridden up. “What the hell do you even want from me, Nathaniel?”

“Because this has _never_ been just about the sex for me and you know that,” he says, roughly, quietly. “I want you to decide what _you_ want, and I want you to just _tell_ me, instead of taking the coward’s way out like you always do.”

“Oh, well that’s rich, coming from Mr my-family-pedigree-doesn’t-do-feelings Plimpton.”

“That’s not fair. I have done nothing _but_ tell you how I feel. You’re the one that doesn’t like to talk, when it comes down to it. You’re the one that keeps giving me the silent treatment.”

She realises bleakly that he has a point. He never got to see her agonising outside this very apartment all those years ago, phone gripped tightly in her hand, wanting more than anything to knock on his door and tell him she was ready. He never had to listen to her cry herself to sleep in her cot the night she crossed the name of everyone she ever cared about off her visitor’s list when she decided they’d all be better off without her. All she’d ever given him was confusion, and the denial of anything remotely close to closure. He wasn’t wrong to call her a coward.

“Because it was too hard,” she blurts out, tears pricking in her eyes. “It was too hard seeing you, and having you tell me things, and wondering about all the things you weren’t telling me. Because five years is a really long time to wait and when I needed space it took you two weeks to find someone else.”

She moves away from the bed towards the windows, wrapping her arms protectively around herself. It takes him immediately back to the first night they’d spent together and the dramatic devolution of the morning after, her vibrating with vindication in nothing but his white dress shirt. His guarded reaction now is much the same as it was back then; he’s never been a match for her at the height of her own agitation.

“That’s not fair either. I gave up everything for you,” he says.

“Everything?” she echoes, incredulous. “ _Everything?_ What exactly did you give up, Nathaniel? Your soon to be live-in girlfriend whom you’d been cheating on for eight months by screwing me in the supply closet every chance you got?” She slow-claps derisively at him. “Wow, what a fucking sacrifice. What a martyr. Mr Perfect Plimpton, right here. Congratulations.”

He clenches his jaw at that, and it’s his turn to start pacing.

“We talked about it, before the hearing. We talked about it, and we had a plan, and you—”

“Your plan was stupid!” she cries at him, tone bordering on hysterical. “Don’t you get that? Your plan was fucking stupid. You’re not a criminal defence attorney, for starters, which was made _abundantly_ clear when you asked me to plead _insanity_ , Nathaniel. How did you think that was going to go, hmm? Did you think they would have just let me off, scot free to what—to run into your arms, without so much as a slap on the wrist? It doesn’t work like that. If you’re crazy enough to push someone off a roof without knowing what you’re doing, you’re crazy enough for them to lock up and throw away the key. Was that part of your amazing plan?”

He’s borne the brunt of this argument before. Rebecca’s mother, an infallible force of nature if he’s ever seen one, had wasted no time in tearing him a new one the minute she’d swept into town, hot on the heels of her daughter’s latest disaster. Naomi had armed herself with more than a few choice words on the way the case had been handled prior to her arrival, and the judgment on his contributions had fallen far from in his favour.

“I just wanted to save you,” he says helplessly. “Rebecca, I—”

“I’m not some damsel in distress and you’re not Prince Charming, okay? You can’t _save_ me.” 

He’s run out of things to say to defend himself and she senses it, he can tell—sees the way her eyes have gone a little hardened and desperate, like an animal cornered in its cage.

“You’re the coward here, Nathaniel. At least I owned up to what I did. To who I was. And I spent the last three years paying penance for that. Unlike you, who just morphed right back into the corporate asshole your daddy raised you to be and went crawling back to LA with your tail between your legs the minute something didn’t go your way.”

“Because I couldn’t be here anymore, Rebecca,” he snaps. “I couldn’t be here in this stupid town that reminded me of you, in that stupid office where we couldn’t keep our hands off each other with Darryl working across the hall and raising your daughter.”

“She’s not my—”

“I know that,” he groans, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I know that she’s Darryl’s, and that you just donated an egg and you think that’s the end of it but the truth is it’s messier than that and you weren’t there anymore but she was, and it was like the only piece of you anyone had left.”

Some of the fury deflates out of her at that, giving way to weariness. She rubs her hand absently across her chest where it’s stayed flushed pink since their arousal morphed so rapidly into ire, her fingers trailing white imprints across the skin.

“You should have stayed with Mona,” she says flatly, pausing in the doorway to the bathroom. “You should have tried harder, instead of wasting all that time with me.”

He can’t help himself—can’t help the way she knows how to push every last one of his buttons.

“If you thought Mona was so good for me, maybe you shouldn’t have _put a hit out on her._ ”

The windows reverberate loudly when she slams the door.

(That night Nathaniel sleeps on the couch and Rebecca hugs Ruth Gator Ginsburg to her chest, touching her fingers to where she can still feel his lips on hers in the dark.)

* * *

She can’t help it, when her iPod finally dies—she immediately bursts into tears.

It’s just that she was being _so_ careful, rationing herself, only letting herself listen to two songs a day. She gets, on a fundamental level, how batteries work—that they’re losing charge even when they’re idle, that regardless of how much she used it it was bound to run out at some point. She gets it. She does. But knowing something and being able to rationally accept something are two different things, she realises. Especially when the thing doing the dying was quite possibly the one thing keeping her _sane_ in all of this.

Nathaniel hasn’t spoken a word to her since she locked herself in the bathroom two nights ago but he’s at her side in an instant the minute he hears her crying.

“Rebecca? What’s wrong?”

She doesn’t want to do this, now—deal with him, and the fallout of their stupid fight—so she shakes her head, dismissive.

“They made _Gone Girl_ into a musical and the soundtrack is… a work of art, honestly. Just really emotional, so.” 

He tilts his head at her in a way that says he knows she’s lying, casting a pointed glance at the blank screen of the iPod in her lap. He crouches in front of her and gently pulls the earbuds from her ears.

“Rebecca.”

Her face crumples and she caves. “I can’t do the thing, anymore,” she says, gesturing desperately at her temple with her index and middle fingers. “The thing where I imagine my life as a series of musical numbers. The music kind of… ran out, and I’ve been trying to get it back. But now my stupid triassic-era iPod is dead and I…”

His shoulder brushes hers as he lowers himself to the floor beside her, mirroring her posture up against the end of the bed. She sniffs and waits for him to say something but he just sits there, long legs stretched out alongside hers, keeping her company. 

“I’m tired, Nathaniel,” she says. “I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of feeling angry, and defensive, and hard done by.” She shrugs hopelessly. “I just want to start over. That’s all I wanted.”

“I know.”

She tips her head back and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I don’t want to die,” she whispers.

It takes her by surprise, his hand bumping gently against hers between them, soft but insistent and comfortingly warm. He waits until she bumps him back, her pinky sliding tentatively over his until he grasps it properly, wrapping his large palm over her tiny one and giving it a squeeze.

“Me either,” he says, eyes still straight ahead. “Too many loose ends.”

* * *

Rebecca Bunch is a forest fire let loose on his fucking life, and there has to be something seriously wrong with him for wanting to rekindle that.

It took him the best part of three years to get there but he thinks he understands, on some level, why she did what she did. It doesn’t make his pride sting any less from the rejection—either time—but it helps him resent her a little less, helps him make peace with the fact that she’d needed to put her own state of mind before his. 

He knows her relationship with consequence has often been complicated.

“No one else knows you’re out,” he says dubiously. “Not even Paula?”

“Heather knows. Which means Paula possibly knows? I’m not really sure. Heather’s way more loyal than I’ve ever deserved, but loyalty to Paula might win out in this case. I have been gone three years.” She pauses to consider. “Heather’s boyfriend Hector knows, though, so it’s a strong possibility everyone in a twenty mile radius does as well. Could go either way.” 

They’re on the floor playing Scrabble—the normal kind, no alcohol or disrobing involved. Boggle had been relegated back to the box it came from after the tension it had caused but word games were better than nothing. Better than sitting at opposite ends of the room and stewing over things they couldn’t change.

She hesitates, not sure if she wants to ask but the desire to know wins out. “How is she? Paula, I mean. Do you ever see her?”

Her eyes stay low to the ground, like she’s afraid to hear an answer either way. Like she’s embarrassed for even asking, because she is.

“Not really,” Nathaniel says with an apologetic shrug. “Not anymore. But I know she’s a damn good lawyer. Great, even. I tried to poach her,” he adds, brows raised to convey how truly impressed he is. “She wouldn’t budge, of course. For reasons I’ll never comprehend, everyone in that place seems to have a misguided sense of loyalty to whatever offbeat family dynamic they have going on there.”

“You were part of that family, too,” she says quietly.

“Funny,” he says, dropping his eyes, “coming from the woman who was so determined to drive me out of it.”

(She doesn’t have anything in answer to that; admitting her underlying motives to taking back the firm seems like a moot point now. And besides, she’s pretty sure they were never that much of a secret. Not to him. Not when it took them two weeks of sharing an office and a handshake later to be back in each others arms. She knows this now about herself more than ever: her capacity for denial has always been infinite.)

“Never worked that well for me, huh?” she says wryly, quirking the side of her mouth. “Look where we keep ending up.”

She’s close, so close, and she’s definitely leaning closer. It’s not just his imagination, the way her breath puffs out and slides against his cheek. He should probably move his letters, just in case, and he would, if his eyes were capable of leaving the curve of her mouth. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Look where we’ve ended up.”

The moment hangs heavy between them, thick with inertia, and though it physically pains him he makes himself be the one to break it, clearing his throat and pushing to his feet.

“You hungry? What are we feeling today? Three Cheetos? Half a Slim Jim? Quarter of a Snickers bar?”

Rebecca blinks, only slightly bewildered, and straightens back up towards her side of the couch.

“Um. Anteater bar? I could do with a little extra energy, I guess. Feeling a little lethargic.” She shakes her head lightly, brushing off the cobwebs of their ruined moment. “I think there’s still some left in the front pocket of my pack.”

He searches her backpack as suggested, still half-stuffed with provisions from her aborted crusade into the mountains. Some of it has come in useful—the gas lighter, the torch, first aid kit for her minor burn. The six month supply of WhiJo’s protein bars she’d packed purely out of solidarity.

“Why were you carrying so much junk in that thing? That pack has to be almost as tall as you.”

“Yup. Weighed about the same, too.” She breaks off a chunk of the protein bar he tosses her and swallows it in an ungraceful gulp. “What do you know about hiking, anyway?”

“I’ve hiked before.”

“You hate the outdoors! You hate _sunlight_.”

He rolls his eyes at her. “Yeah well, okay, Boy Scout. _You’re_ allergic to mosquitoes.”

She laughs at that, and it starts out small at first until it’s echoing out and vibrating through her entire frame, folding her over at the waist with the force of it until there’s tears in her eyes.

“Oh my god, I am _so allergic_ to mosquitoes, you have no idea.” She wipes at her face, still lightly shaking with laughter, and clears her throat in an abysmal attempt to compose herself. “No, but they have patches for that now. I didn’t get bit once.”

He makes her laugh, and Nathaniel doesn’t realise how much he’s missed the sound until it’s spilling unexpectedly out of her, heartbreakingly genuine, filling up the room and taking warm root deep inside the centre of his chest.

He’s made people laugh before, of course—but back in LA making people laugh was about elitist in-jokes, vaguely sexist remarks and repeated bits around the water cooler. There was a certain perfunctory emptiness to that; a falseness, meant for keeping up appearances more than joy. Rebecca knew that laugh, too—he’s heard her use it on clients, on undeserving old men she was falling over herself to flatter in the name of closing a deal. But that wasn’t the laugh she gifted him.

She’d giggled, when he’d held his breath joking at her outside her door—was it even allowed, going for humour, post-suicide attempt? Was there an appropriate period of time one should wait before attempting banter? He’d felt so out of his depth, par for the course around Rebecca—and the music of it had moved right through him. Fast forward two weeks and he’d had her practically doubled over in delight, unable to fight the grin off his own face even as he’d passed a wary looking Paula on the porch. He’d never felt such a compulsion to be silly before, but if that was the response it drew he’d gladly make a fool of himself again and again and again. And anyway—isn’t that what he’d already been doing? Making a fool of himself in the name of Rebecca Bunch?

She catches the way he’s looking at her—far too earnestly, no doubt; forever tripping over himself when it comes to her—and softens, her lips scrunching together in an adorably self-conscious half-smile.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

He lets out a breath. The air doesn’t feel so thick anymore.

* * *

Rebecca wakes to the sound of music.

A lingering remnant from her dreams, surely—soft and lilting with lyrics she can’t quite place. But when she rolls over, tied up from where the sheets have tangled around her legs it’s still there; her eyes snap open as she kicks her way out of the blankets and struggles to sit up against the headboard.

Nathaniel’s on his knees near the window, fiddling around with the stereo. It’s a remnant from when the room was his—abandoned in favour of a fancy LA upgrade, no doubt—and she’d all but forgotten its existence. Not anymore. Now she’s aware of little else but his fingers on the dials and the unmistakable _sound_ coming from the speakers.

He turns and stands when he notices she’s awake.

She stares back at him, wide-eyed. “The power’s back on?”

“No. I remembered that the stereo has back up batteries. I have no idea how long they’ll last, mind you, but—”

It takes three clumsy strides for her to cross to the side of the room. She cuts him off when her body collides with his, her arms flinging around his neck in a grateful squeeze that sends him stumbling backwards, caught off-guard.

“Thank you,” she mumbles against him.

He makes a tiny _oof_ noise in response, his palm hovering tentative across her back. She pulls herself away before his hand makes up its mind.

“What is this? Is this the radio?”

He clears his throat when she steps away from him. “Whatever CD was left in there, I guess. I never used it that often.”

“I love it, whatever it is. It’s beautiful. Perfect. I want to listen to it forever.”

It feels almost like an intrusion, watching her after that—Rebecca sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the shelving, attention undivided on the stereo, brow creased with childlike wonder as she closes her eyes and lets the music wash over, soothing her, waking her up. She looks peaceful, calm. Like she could be three years younger, if he squints the right way.

(Later that night she checks the radio stations for signals but finds nothing but empty static.)

* * *

“So,” Rebecca announces proudly, “I was looking through my stuff for all my old CDs and guess who just found the perfect mixtape to the end of the world?”

“Do I even want to know?”

She shrugs and turns the volume dial up as far as it will go, the sound of it shocking after so many days spent in mostly undisturbed silence, and the loudness makes him uncomfortable. Rebecca is in her element, though—her body rolling exaggeratedly, hypnotically, her hips sashaying obscenely in time with the punches in the music. It becomes abundantly clear she has a questionable grasp on the lyrics but she doesn’t let that stop her, either, leaping up onto the edge of the bed with a burst of gusto that has his eyebrows climbing his forehead in alarm.

“Dance with me,” she pouts.

“You know I’m not going to do that.”

Ignoring his protests she flings her arms out in front of her, pointing at him and beckoning as her dance moves become increasingly lewd. He resists the impulse to let her reel him in, keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground but feeling himself still inexplicably tugged towards her, an invisible tripwire strung out between them, keeping them connected, waiting to explode.

“ _It’s getting hot in here,_ ” she wails.

“Stop,” he says, swallowing at the way she starts dragging the fabric of her t-shirt up her sides, hinting at bare skin.

“ _So take off all your clothes._ ”

“Rebecca.”

“ _I am. Getting. So hot. I wanna take my clothes off_.”

It’s the most carefree he’s seen her since she barrelled her way back into his life and for a perfect unguarded moment she’s loose and light and everything he ever let himself love about her. 

It figures that this would be his flashpoint.

She loses her footing and teeters on the edge of the bed frame, pitching forward and barely righting herself as she stumbles back to the ground, laughing when he instinctively rushes forwards to catch her. He steadies her with his hands at her waist, trying to pull her into a stop but when his fingers brush hers and her body bumps gently into his he short circuits; his jaw goes slack and he can’t keep his eyes from dropping down to her mouth just in time to see the smile slide right off it.

She has oceans in her eyes when she looks up at him, wild and damp and whirling with blue and green fury, and he wants nothing more than to slip inside her siren’s call and _drown_.There’s a beat, and without warning every messy emotion he’s spent the last two years tamping down on surges and spills out into him like an uncontrollable tide.

Her hands drop away from the hem but then he’s yanking the shirt off for her, the needy noise she makes when her mouth crashes into his crystallising somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach. Hoisting her into his arms, he stumbles sideways towards the wall to brace himself, thrown off-balance by her answering enthusiasm, and Rebecca quickly takes advantage of the surface support to arch against him, her knees squeezing insistently at his sides.

“Off,” she grunts, tugging at his own t-shirt where it’s trapped between them and whining in protest when he has to pull his mouth from hers to obey.

When she fumbles for the button on his pants he tracks his hands up from her thighs to the curve of her ass, drawing her back against him long enough to navigate the short few steps back across the room to deposit her on the mattress. The wall is well and good and he’s never been opposed to a challenge but it’s been _three years,_ and even before all that it’s been so long, too long, since he’s had the luxury of laying her out on a bed and being able to take his time with her.

Her skin sliding against his and her breath in his ear is everything he’s missed and more, and it stokes inside him an insistent desire that’s grown only stronger in her absence, more determined and self assured. She shifts, restless, and he’s pulled from his daze by the jostling of her hands beneath him, wriggling to divest herself of her own shorts, impatient. He lets her kick them aside but stops her before she can go for her underwear.

“Wait,” he says, panting. “We should—we should slow down. Last time you said—”

“Screw what we said last time,” she says, skimming her hand up to cup the back of his neck. “If it’s the end of the world, I just want to feel good.”

“And if it’s not?” he asks, seriously, searching her eyes. 

“You,” she gasps. She shakes her head. “I just want to feel _you.”_

He lets that be enough.

She sits up to discard her bra and when she crawls back towards him he grips her by her hips to help haul her over him into his lap, pulling her firmly against the evidence of his want for her and allowing his lips to twitch in satisfaction when she tears her mouth away from his to whimper at the sensation.

“Need you,” she moans, grinding down on him, in search of further friction. “ _Now_.”

Hands on the base of her spine, he rolls them gently until he’s easing his body weight back onto her, sinking into the space between her parted thighs. He pushes up onto his arms to look at her—heavy-lidded and breathing shallow, her pale skin flushed enticingly pink—before ducking down to steal a quick kiss, scrambling to divest himself of the rest of his clothes and raid the bedside drawer for a condom.

He pushes into her and swallows her gasp; they stay like that for a moment, foreheads pressed together, her eyes scrunched shut and fingers clenching at his shoulders as she breathes, fingernails digging angry crescent moons into his scapulae.

“Okay?” he murmurs, nudging her jaw gently with his nose.

She tightens her legs around him in lieu of a response, holding him deep and close and still inside of her.

And then she’s kissing him again with a desperate whine, relaxing the vice-grip of her thighs and he shifts tentatively, experimentally, mere millimetres until she rolls her hips up into him, silently spurring him on and short circuiting his brain.

They snap back together like magnets, pushing and pulling and thrumming with electricity, tightening and coiling with tension, her teeth knocking against his in her urgency. She clings to him like she never let him go, like she’s never thought of leaving, and he gladly accepts the lie again and again as he sinks into her.

“I want to stay inside you forever,” he breathes into her ear. “You feel so good, Rebecca. I—”

He breaks off on a groan, his impossibly large hand curling around the top of her head and into her hair as he kisses her bruisingly hard into the mattress until they’re both gasping for air. She arches, dragging him closer, and he stares down at her splayed out beneath him and wishes he were capable of looking at her some other way than like she’s a universe made up entirely of her freckles for stars.

“This is all I’ve— _god._ This is all I’ve wanted, for so long. Just me and you. Nothing else.”

If it weren’t for the fact the world was very possibly ending and they might not survive the week, she’d pull him up for being so goddamned dramatic. It’s always been secretly so reaffirming, though, to have someone finally as desperate for her as she’s always felt herself; to be desired by someone so wholly unabashed in their answering need.

 _I wanted that too_ , she wants to assure him, her dampening eyes fluttering shut as her arms tighten around his neck. _I wanted so much to let myself want that. You have no idea._

But what she really wants now is for him to stop talking, to let her focus on nothing but his grounding weight above her and every exquisite inch at which they’re joined. 

She clutches at him, crying out and stifling her sob into his shoulder as she comes, drawing him closer, closer with her heels digging at him until his hips snap hard against hers and he stutters into her, enveloping her in his muscular arms as they twitch and tremble and ride out the aftershocks together.

He knocks his nose against hers as he fumbles to kiss her, leisurely and languorous and open-mouthed, and Rebecca sighs into it in contentment. Stretching in satisfaction beneath him as he lifts himself off her and lowers onto his side, she threads her hand idly through his hair where he’s still half-sprawled over her, head pillowed on her chest. 

“I can’t believe we just had sex to an *NSYNC song,” she says, her breath still coming in shallow pants. “Why does that make me feel like I just lost my virginity for the second time?”

He grunts out his amusement, nuzzling affectionately at her breast. “I hope that wasn’t some sort of insult against my technique.”

She slaps him lightly on the shoulder. “Quit fishing for compliments.”

Fingers skimming her side and taking stock of where it makes her squirm, he eventually settles his hand on her hip, rubbing gently at the skin there, his stubbled cheek rough where it rests against the pale expanse of her stomach.

He thumbs at the sweat pooling in her navel and stares at the nearby green-black blemish on her skin, the chicken-scratch script above her hipbone he’d noticed earlier but had been too sex-hazed to hone in on.

“You got a prison tattoo?” he asks softly, eyebrows raised. “Really?”

“Oh god, don’t remind me,” she groans, scrambling to cover it with her hand only to have him twist his fingers through hers to pull it away. “And technically it’s a post-prison tattoo. A post-prison prison-friend tattoo, to be precise. I got it the day after I got out from a girl I met on the inside. I gave her some unofficial legal advice, so she insisted that she owed me. Dying from hepatitis was my initial concern, but t’was a blinding pain, the likes of which I’ve never experienced before and never plan to again. So if childbirth wasn’t already off the cards for me, it definitely is now.”

“It’s upside-down,” he points out.

“For you, maybe. But it’s not for you, it’s for me. I mean, not that I can see it that well either, since my boobs kind of get in the way. But that was the general idea.”

For a brief, bewildering moment he hates everything about it, this imperfect intrusion on the softness of her skin; a raw reminder, marring his memory of her. But then he rubs his thumb gently over the words— _your history is not your destiny—_ making her stomach clench, and leans down to seal his lips over it in a light kiss.

For the longest stretch they lie like that in companionable silence, curled together, fingers tracing idly, feeling each other out, reacquainting. It physically pains him, how much he's missed this, and the weight of the months and years he’s spent pretending he hasn’t. Pretending he wasn’t agonisingly aware that he’d never wanted something quite so much as her in a very long time.

Wriggling to get comfortable she draws her knee up beside him, sending his attention skating down the length of her leg, and when he reaches the flow of her calf into his ankle they both tense at what he encounters; another new addition, her modern-day ball-and-chain suddenly an unavoidable elephant in the room. He swallows and dips the very tips of his fingers beneath the plastic, soothing the skin below the black band. It hurts the same way it hurt to see her look so small inside that orange jumpsuit, or impossibly imprisoned behind plexiglass; Rebecca has always represented freedom to him, in a way, and it’s a confusing kind of sting to see her in any way constrained. 

She smiles down at him glumly and flexes her toes.

“Latest fashion, right?”

For a brief moment he entertains the heroic notion of breaking her loose; imagines them escaping face-first into the dying flames and disappearing without a trace, forgotten amidst the ashes and the embers. Even if they did manage to put the fires out, there’d be chaos and confusion for days—weeks and months, even. Surely it’d be _so easy_ just to slip away.

But then he thinks back to the weight of her cradled in his arms as he’d planned to whisk her off to Rome before the breakdown, recalls the softness of her curls cupped in his hands in the interrogation room and the silent apology she’d shot him in the courtroom; he knows he needs to stop telling himself he can save her, especially when he’s just finished begging her not to run and hide. Especially when she's been trying so hard for so long to save herself.

He moves back up onto the pillow and fights the urge to pull her closer, mindful of the stifling heat and hypersensitive as ever to the delicate makeup of whatever it is she’s currently allowing to coexist between them, surprised but infinitely hopeful when she shifts towards him of her own accord, leg insinuating itself between his and her hand sliding up towards his neck.

“I missed you,” she mumbles, still sweat-soaked, head ducked shyly against his chest, and the words work their way right between his ribs to wrap around his heart and _squeeze._

The air in the apartment is still uncomfortably warm and being sealed together with perspiration as they are isn’t helping but right now Nathaniel wouldn’t trade it for the world—especially one that’s currently being ravaged with wildfire around them. If he has to be taken out by an apocalypse he wants it to be exactly like this—Rebecca in his arms, on his mind, his breath and his hummingbird heartbeat slowing and synchronising seamlessly with hers. He doesn’t care how sappy and sentimental and decidedly un-masculine that sounds—the combination of days without proper nutrition and the sudden burst of oxytocin flooding all the streams in his system is doing something incomprehensible to his brain. If they stay here like this forever, he thinks selfishly, they can’t fall back onto old patterns. He doesn’t have to consider he still might have to let her go.

“I missed you too,” he tells her hoarsely, without hope of ever conveying how much he means it.

(He hates the part of him that can’t help but wonder how maybe if it were Josh she was stuck with here like this, things might’ve gone a similar way.)

* * *

“Why were you out there? What were you even doing?”

They’re sprawled out on the floor, Rebecca’s knees hooked up over the side of the bed and looking like she’s just fallen out of it, an arm’s width between them because the heat finally got to them and it’s cooler this way. 

There’s a tequila bottle and a candy wrapper by the bottom of the nightstand—remnants of their dinner for evening—and the CD player’s on low, Duran Duran providing a soft, synth-pop diegetic soundtrack to their afterglow.

“Oh my god,” she moans, flinging an arm across her eyes. “Why does everybody keep asking me that? I was trying to do _Wild_ , okay? Only I’m not allowed across state lines so I couldn’t actually do the whole Pacific Crest, just a section of the San Gabriel range. I was doing _Wild_ Lite, and I fell and I cracked my head open and everything caught fire. The falling and the fire were unrelated,” she adds, for clarification. “They actually think the fire was started by lightning, so.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he says, shaking his head, and she turns to look at him. “What were you _doing?_ ”

She gets what he’s asking, she does, but she isn’t really sure she has a satisfactory answer. She’s no stranger to impulse. If the last three years had been New York, disappearing off into the desert had been her cross-country move.

“Getting lost,” she says with a shrug. She stares down at her hand where it’s fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “Getting lost and trying to find myself. So I could start over again. Kinda like an extremely ungraceful phoenix, rising from the ashes.”

“Hmm.”

The way his eyes fixate on the ceiling suggest he’s not convinced.

“I wasn’t… trying to do anything stupid,” she insists. “I wasn’t trying to be reckless. Sometimes this stuff, it just—it follows me around, you know?”

He inches closer to her on the rug. Reaches out to smooth a sticky curl back from her forehead and nods.

“Okay.”

They finish off the bottle and have languid, lazy, drunken sex in the lowlight, the muted blaze through his curtains casting everything in amber, preserving it, making it feel like maybe it could last forever.

* * *

She wakes to the distant sound of running water, scrunching up her face at the combination of her brain screaming from dehydration and confusion, whining in protest and twisting in closer to her human pillow.

“Oh god, tequila regret,” she moans, his only response a noncommittal grunt and the cursory tightening of his arm around her waist.

The sluicing sound persists, though, and when sleep refuses to reclaim her she pushes bleary-eyed up onto her elbows in confusion, blinking in the direction of the kitchen.

She thumps him on the chest when the realisation hits her. “Hey, wake up. I think the water’s back on.”

Scrambling to her feet and stumbling into the kitchen, she squeaks in surprise when her bare feet connect with the wet tile. Splashing through towards the back counter she hurriedly shuts off the faucet, stemming the steadily trickling waterfall overflowing from the already full-to-brim sink.

“Oh,” she breathes, skimming her hand through the excess liquid on the edge of the bench. She scoops some up and splashes it across her face in relief. “Thank god.”

It’s cool and soothing on the back of her throat and after she drains the glass twice she refills it a third time and presses it against her forehead with a sigh before making her way back towards the bed.

She only hesitates a moment before dipping her fingers into the glass and flicking them at him, biting her lip in amusement when he flinches and recoils with a muffled groan.

“What the hell, Rebecca?”

“Hey, sit up and have something to drink.”

Scrubbing his fist across his face he pulls himself into a half-recline, accepting the proffered glass. She’s still naked from the night before and she swallows at the unguarded way he regards her as he drinks before reaching for her shirt and pulling it on, an uncharacteristic display of modesty.

“Not exactly what we deserve, after overindulging in diuretics when it’s literally hot as hell and our water supply was running out, but a relief nonetheless. The water coming back on—that’s a good sign, right?”

“Definitely not a bad one,” he agrees.

Finishing off the rest of the water when he offers it to her, she sinks back into the mattress beside him with a moan, curling towards him companionably but keeping some spare inches between them for body heat’s sake. He skims his hand up the back of her thigh to the bare skin of her ass before letting it come to rest lightly on her lower back, thumb stroking soothingly at her side.

“We should refill the containers. But I’m tired,” she mumbles. “And hungry.”

“You can have my share of the Cheetos. I’ll survive without. I promise.”

She cracks an eyelid to quirk her lips at him in a half-smile.

He doesn’t bother dressing, easing himself out of the bed and heading straight for the kitchen, collecting the discarded and empty pots and pans he’d mocked her for repurposing from the table on his way and kicking through the flooded tile into the kitchen. When he’s done he comes back to the bedside for the tequila bottle; rinses it out and fills that, too. Brings it to her and places it on the night stand for if she needs it.

“I made breakfast,” he tells her, perching on the edge of the bed. 

She surveys the tray table with a tempered grin.

“A raw Poptart? My favourite. But I bet you cook that for all the girls.”

He hums. “Only the ones stupid enough to move in.”

* * *

The air in the apartment is stale and souring, heady with the scent of their sweat and sex mixed with the lingering smell of smoke from her earlier misadventure in the kitchen and Rebecca wrinkles her nose in revulsion, wishing not for the first time that they could crack a window.

She’s curled in an armchair with her second-hand copy of _Sex and the Single Girl_ , Nathaniel nearby on the couch perusing a stack of old editions of the _Harvard Crimson_ she’d written for, calling her attention to any particularly colourful turns of phrase he finds amusing and critiquing her style. It’s a strange sense of enforced domesticity, the two of them, reading together as if they had any other choice in the matter and had decided precisely on this.

A low, deep rumble startles her from her reverie, drawing her like a moth to the lamplight of the dimly-lit drapes.

“Was that thunder?”

Yanking the curtains apart she flinches at the heat radiating from the other side of the glass but goes immediately still at the sight before her, the valley still aglow with hotspots but with way more smoke than there was before, almost like steam, and the shimmering of something else, too.

“Holy shit. I think it’s raining.”

She climbs into the shower later and lets the water run lukewarm over her, tipping her face up into the spray and imagining she’s outside in the downpour, soaking it all into her skin, synthesising, emerging from the embers burnt back, washed clean, ready to regrow.

* * *

“Rebecca.”

She makes an unimpressed humming noise, still caught in the barely responsive fog hanging between wake and sleep, until Nathaniel nudges the shell of her ear with his nose and murmurs her name again.

When she rolls over to face him he’s got an arm pinned over her to hold himself up but he pushes back once he’s got her attention, propping onto an elbow instead. 

“There’s cell service again. She’s safe,” he says, holding up his phone. “Bianca, I mean. Darryl, he got out before they shut the interstate.”

She blinks at the screen and catches the words of the messages that follow— _I’m with Rebecca, we’re safe too—_ before she can tear her eyes away, and she swallows without reading Darryl’s response and tucks her face into Nathaniel’s neck, not entirely sure what she’s feeling but whatever it is it’s tinged with dizzying, overwhelming relief and a surge of gratefulness towards him for making it his first order of business to check.

“Paula?” she whispers.

He shakes his head. “Haven’t heard yet. But we don’t know how long it’s has been back up. I should turn this off for now. But if there’s service, that means the power’s back on somewhere.”

She scrunches her eyes shut and nods reluctantly, trying to force herself to take deep, steadying breaths. Nathaniel powers off his phone and drops it onto the bed beside them before slipping his arm around her and resting his forehead against hers.

“We can check again tonight. Do you have a number for Heather? Or your mom?”

She shakes her head. “What about you?” she asks quietly. “What about your people?”

“I’m good. My people are your people,” he says, clearing his throat and tucking her hair behind her ear.

“Nathaniel. What about your mom? Your dad?”

“Summering in the Hamptons,” he says dismissively, trailing soothing patterns up and down her arm with his fingers in an obvious attempt to placate her. When the look she gives him is entirely disbelieving he sighs and says, “I don’t need to check in with my parents. I can tell you exactly what they were doing in the lead up to the end of the world. My dad would have been working, right up to the last possible minute. And my mom—she would’ve been gathering up every damn vase and useless trinket in the house to put in the ‘must be protected at all costs’ pile, wandering from room to room and weeping about what the poisoned air was going to do to her roses. And then, when my dad couldn’t work anymore—not for lack of trying, but because all his clients would finally be otherwise occupied with, you know, saving their own vases—he would have called up the family jet, and they would have gone away. Probably to the Hamptons.”

She stews on that for a moment. “You’re not even a little bit curious? A little bit concerned?”

“Nope.”

(She lets the subject drop but later when he lets her turn the phone on for five minutes to check for messages she sees the three calls he tried to make to his mother while she was still asleep.)

* * * 

She’s traipsing through the centre of town, the sidewalk singeing and peppered with soot but for all accounts otherwise empty; there’s not a person in sight in any direction, and the resulting silence is so unnerving that she finds herself shivering despite the warmth. The buildings are familiar and yet foreign at the same time—shapes and stylings that she remembers but void of any distinguishing features. She doesn’t know where she’s going but she keeps walking there anyway, following her feet down the still-blackening path.

The heat beats down on her, searing against her back, and isn’t until she turns to glance behind that she realises the source—a telltale trace of scorch marks outlining every step she’s taken, scalding and simmering down the sidewalk where she’s blazed her trail. 

She stands there frozen, catching fire, watching West Covina burn and fade away into nothing like an obliterated dying star.

It’s eerie and empty and still until it’s flooded with falsetto; Frankie Valli minus the Four Seasons, all head-voice and hair product and no particular bite. She tries to focus on the sound of it, on the music and the words and what they mean but the harder she grasps at it the quicker it floats away, billowing out and wrapping itself around everything until it’s extinguished, expired, and quenched.

“Mr Wind? Where are you going?” Rebecca mumbles, fumbling to follow him but catching her feet on the concrete until she’s slipping, stumbling, sitting straight up in the bed.

Across the room, the TV’s flickering, casting the walls in a soft coloured light, an Aurora Borealis splashed across the brickwork in Technicolor.

Her heart thuds excitedly in her chest. 

“Nathaniel. Nathaniel, hey. Wake up. The power’s back on.” 

He stirs obediently, albeit reluctantly, curling around her from behind. She’s still staring disbelievingly at the television, her incredulity knocked up a notch when she squints at the figure on the screen with a jolt of recognition.

“Hey,” she says fondly, voice still scratchy with sleep. “It’s Gavin. Oh my god. I never thought I’d be so happy to see you, Gavin.”

“Who?” Nathaniel mumbles into the skin of her shoulder.

Nearly tripping over her feet in the process she scrambles across the room to fling herself into the couch, eyes glued exclusively to the screen and the comforting sight of the weatherman in his crisp blue suit. There’s numbers scrolling across the bottom, emergency ones, and updates, too. She doesn’t register Nathaniel reaching for his phone until he’s crossed the space to stand beside her, commanding her attention by pressing it gently into her hands.

When she glances at the screen, the name _Paula Proctor_ greets her from the top of the message window, and her stomach somersaults and sinks in on itself.

_Good to hear. You keep my firebug safe. We’ve got some catching up to do._

She can’t choke back the sob that claws its way up her throat at that; something hopeful and eager flares up for a moment inside her at the impossibly sweet sensation of a second chance. She claws her way up to him and he accepts her gladly, pulling her tightly against his chest, head folding over hers and nosing into her hair. The world still feels off-kilter but in a good way; dizzying and buzzing, bright with something like relief.

Her arms wind around him with the quiet determination of creeper vines, holding him steady and close and unwilling to let go.

“Hey. If we get out of here… it changes things,” she says gently, slightly muffled, her nose indented into his collarbone. “You know that, right?”

When she pulls back reluctantly to look at him his expression rearranges itself and hardens, and she flails to explain herself, a placating palm coming up to cup the side of his face.

“I’m not taking it back. I’m not. I promise. It’s just… it’s been _three years_. I’m not the same person I was three years ago,” she says imploringly. “Not necessarily better, or worse. Just… different. But Nathaniel—in the grand scheme of things, you and I barely know each other. We barely knew each other three years ago.”

He sees her point, honestly he does. It’s just—

He knows by rote each step for how she takes her coffee, her tea, the level of schmear she likes on her bagel; knows which foods she doesn’t like to let touch on her plate, the awkward way she holds a fork when she doesn’t mind who’s around to notice and every ridiculous opinion that’s ever crossed her mind on soup.

He knows the sprawled out way she likes to fall asleep and the tiny contented noise of surrender she makes when she gets there, pressed up against his back after he’s sighed and rolled over, where she can slide an arm around his waist and nuzzle into his armpit when she wants to, drop lazy kisses on his shoulders and fit the backs of his heels into the spaces between her big and pointer toes.

He knows about the deep, dark caverns left inside her she’s been fighting to fill in and who occupied them first. About Robert. About Josh. The places she finds herself sinking when she’s nursing her broken heart.

He knows a lot of things. Things he’s never cared to know about another person before, and surely, _surely_ that all has to _mean something._

(He knows enough to know he’s still hopelessly, stupidly, head-over-heels and upend-his-life in love with her—whoever she was, is, will be—and that he still isn’t ready to let her go, not yet.)

“I thought I knew you pretty well,” he says, lips quirking up in a melancholy half-smile.

“What I’m saying is… I’ve still got a lot of things to figure out, even without the whole ‘End of Days’ fallout. So maybe we should keep getting to know each other first? In a platonic way?” She’s relieved when she earns the huffed out laugh she was going for, mirroring his reluctant grin before fading back into seriousness. “Because regardless of anything else, I would really, really, _really_ like it if you and I could be friends.”

He glances down at her hands squeezing his for a moment then nods. “I’d like that too.”

He still looks uncertain, though, so she decides to gift him some reassurance.

“Only, you know. Maybe the sort of friends that still have sex occasionally while they’re trapped in a building riding out a wildfire apocalypse. Because there’s kind of not that much to do in here, and we’ve gotta pass the time somehow.”

His hesitant smile stretches into a fully blown one as he settles his hands over her hips to tug her towards him. “Mm, my favourite kind of platonic.”

“How many rubbers you got left in that box, anyway? I’m just saying, it might still be awhile before we get out of here—we should probably ration ourselves. Conserve energy, and all that.”

His fingers creep from her waist down to toy with the band of her underwear.

“You make a good point. But I think I have some ideas of what else we could do in the meantime.”

“Oh yeah? I’m definitely listening.”

She grins into his kiss, gratified, lifting up onto the balls of her feet to get at him.

It’s not a solution to anything, not by a long shot. She makes his life messy and he drowns out all the noise. But she feels calmer—full of promise, even—like she can breathe deeper than she has in weeks, and she’s happy to wait and see how things pan out.

* * *

The smoke has already started to clear.


End file.
